Portraits In Miniature(1931)

Municipal Library,

NAINI TAL.

Class No . __ - 329 -
Book No. _ St 27 *P

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

By Lytton Strachey

ELIZABETH AND ESSEX
QUEEN VICTORIA
EMINENT VICTORIANS
BOOKS < 2 ? CHARACTERS

Chatto & Windus

PORTRAITS
IN MINIATURE

AND OTHER ESSAYS

By

LYTTON STRACHEY

Est brevitate opus , ut currat sententia , neu se
Tmpediat verbis lassas onerantibus awes .

HOR. I. SAT. X.

LONDON

Chatto & Windus

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

To

MAX BEERBOHM

WITH GRATITUDE
AND ADMIRATION

These essays are reprinted by kind permission of the
Editors of the New Statesman and Nation , and Life and
Letters .

CONTENTS

Sir John Harington

page i

Muggleton

IO

John Aubrey

19

The Life, Illness, and Death of Dr. North

29

Congreve, Collier, Macaulay,

and Mr.

Summers

40

Madame de S6vign6’s Cousin

50

The Sad Story of Dr. Colbatch

60

The President de Brasses

7 0

James Boswell

87

The Abb£ Morellet

98

Mary Berry

108

Madame de Lieven

120

Six English Historians :

Hume

141

Gibbon

154

Macaulay

169

Carlyle

181

Froude

195

Creighton

207

SIR JOHN HARINGTON

An old miniature shows a young man’s face,
whimsically Elizabethan, with tossed-back curly
hair, a tip-tilted nose, a tiny point of a beard,
and a long single earring, falling in sparkling
drops over a ruff of magnificent proportions.
Such was John Harington, as he appeared in
the happy fifteen-eighties, at Greenwich, or at
Nonesuch — a courtier, a wit, a scholar, a poet,
and a great favourite with the ladies. Even
Gloriana herself usually unbent when he ap-
proached her. She liked the foolish fellow. She
had known him since he was a child ; he was
her godson — almost, indeed, a family connec-
tion, for his father’s first wife had been a natural
daughter of her own indefatigable sire. Through
this lady the young man had inherited his fine
Italian house at Kelston, in Somersetshire, where
one day Elizabeth, on her way to Bath, paid him
the honour of an extremely expensive visit. He
had felt himself obliged to rebuild half the house

r

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

to lodge his great guest fittingly ; but he cared
little for that — he wrote a rhyming epigram
about it all, which amused the ladies of the
bedchamber. He wrote, he found, with extra-
ordinary ease and pleasure ; the words came
positively running off the end of his pen ; and
so — to amuse the ladies again, or to tease them —
he translated the twenty-eighth book of Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso, in which the far from decorous
history of the fair Fiametta is told. The Queen
soon got wind of this. She read the manuscript
and sent for the poet. She was shocked, she
said, by this attempt to demoralize her house-
hold ; and she banished the offender from Court
until — could there be a more proper punish-
ment ?— he should have completed the transla-
tion of the whole poem. Harington hurried off
to Kelston, worked away for a month or two,
and returned with a fine folio containing the
entire Orlando in English, together with notes, a
life of Ariosto, “ a general allegory of the
whole,” and “ apologie of Poetrie,” an “ epistle
dedicatorie to the Queenes Majestie,” and an
engraved title-page with the portrait of himself
and his dog Bungay. The book was printed in
1591. The exquisite elegance and mature

2

SIR JOHN HARINGTON

serenity of the original are nowhere to be found
in it ; but Harington himself, bringing with him
the natural abundance, the charming ingenuous-
ness, the early morning freshness of his wonderful
generation, comes to us delightfully on every
page.

The translation was well received, and the
gay young man looked about for new worlds to
conquer. Not to be talked of was his only fear.
A curious notion struck him. His nose was
sensitive as well as impudent, and he had been
made to suffer agonies by the sanitary arrange-
ments in the houses of the great. Suddenly
inspired, he invented the water-closet. Then,
seizing his pen, he concocted a pamphlet after
the manner of Rabelais — or, as he preferred to
call him, “ the reverent Rabbles ” — in which
extravagant spirits, intolerable puns, improper
stories, and sly satirical digs at eminent person-
ages were blended together into a preposterous
rhapsody, followed by an appendix — written, of
course, by his servant — could a gentleman be
expected to discuss such details ? — containing a
minute account, with measurements, diagrams
and prices, of the new invention. The Meta-
morphosis of Ajax — for so the book, with a

3

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

crowningly deplorable pun, was entitled — created
some sensation. Qjieen Elizabeth was amused.
But then some malicious courtier told her that
one of the satirical digs was aimed atthememory
of Leicester, whereupon her smiles changed to
frowns, the Star Chamber was talked of, and
Harington made a strategic retreat to Somerset-
shire. “ The merry poet, my godson,” the
Queen declared, “must not come to Green-
wich, till he hath grown sober and Ieavcth the
ladies’ sports and frolics.” But before very long
she relented. With her supreme sense of the
practical, she saw that, as she put it, “ the
marrow of the book” was not entirely ludi-
crous ; she sent down word to the poet that she
approved of his invention ; and eventually she
set the fashion for the new contrivances by
installing one of them in Richmond Palace,
with a copy of the Ajax hanging from the
wall.

Harington’s next adventure was more serious.
He was summoned by Essex to join his ill-fated
expedition to Ireland, in command of a troop
of horse. In Ireland, with a stretch of autho-
rity which was bitterly resented by the Queen,
Harington was knighted by the rash Lord

4

SIR JOHN HARINGTON

Deputy, and afterwards, when disaster came
thick upon disaster, he followed his patron back
to London. In fear and trembling, he pre-
sented himself before the enraged Elizabeth.
“ What ! ” she cried, “ did the fool bring you
too ? ” The terrified poet fell upon his knees,
while the Queen, as he afterwards described it,
“ chafed much, walked fastly to and fro, and
looked with discomposure in her visage.” Then,
suddenly rushing towards him, she caught hold
of his girdle. “ By God’s Son,” she shouted,
“ I am no Queen, and that man is above me 1 ”
His stammering excuses were cut short with a
“ Go back to your business ! ” uttered in such
a tone that Sir John, not staying to be bidden
twice, fled out of the room, and fled down to
Kelston, “ as if all the Irish rebels had been at
his heels.”

It is clear that poor Harington never quite
recovered from the shock of that terrific scene.
The remainder of his life passed in ineffective-
ness and disillusionment. In the bosom of his
family he did his best to forget the storms and
shipwrecks of “ the Essex coast ” ; he wrote
incessantly ; he cracked scandalous jokes with
his mother-in-law, old Lady Rogers ; he busied

5

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

himself over the construction of a curious
lantern for King James of Scotland. But his
happy vein had deserted him. His Discourse
shewing that Elyas must personally come before
the Day of Judgment could never get finished,
and he threw aside his Treatise on Playe as a
failure. His epigrams, no doubt, were more
successful ; he scribbled them down on every
possible occasion, and the most scurrilous he
invariably dispatched to old Lady Rogers. She
roared with laughter, but omitted to leave him
a legacy. He dashed into her house as she
was dying, broke open the chests, tried to get
possession of everything, and was at last igno-
miniously ejected by his brother-in-law. King
James was equally disappointing. Even the
curious lantern, even a learned, elaborate, and
fantastic dissertation On the Succession to the
Crown, failed to win him. After he had been
a year in London, the new King granted
Sir John an interview, but, though his Majesty
was polite, he was not impressed. “ Sir John,”
he said, with much gravity, “ do you truly
understand why the Devil works more with
ancient women than others ? ” And, unluckily,
on that, Sir John “ could not refrain from a

6

SIR JOHN harington;

scurvy jest.” Nevertheless, though he felt that
he had made no headway, he would not despair ;
a little later, the Lord Chancellorship of Ireland
and the Archbishopric of Dublin fell vacant,
and the author of Ajax bravely requested that
he should be appointed to both offices. Oddly
enough, his application received no answer.
He solaced himself with an endeavour to win
the good graces of the young Prince Henry, to
whom he addressed a discourse, full of pleasant
anecdotes, concerning all the bishops of his
acquaintance, followed by a letter describing
“ the good deedes and straunge feats ” of his
“ rare Dogge,” Bungay — how he used to carry
messages from London to Kelston, and how, on
one occasion, he took a pheasant from a dish
at the Spanish Ambassador’s table, and then
returned it to the very same dish, at a secret
sign from his master.

But in truth the days of Bungay were over,
and the new times were uncomfortable and
st range. “ I ne’er did see such lack of good
order, discretion, and sobriety.” There had
been jollities and junketings, no doubt, in his
youth, but surely, they were different. He
remembered the “ heroicall dames,” the “stately

7

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

heroyns ” whom he had celebrated afore-
time —

These entertayn great Princes ; these have

learned

The tongues, toys, tricks of Rome, of Spayn,

of Fraunce ;

These can correntos and lavoltas daunce,

And though they foote it false ’tis ne’er

discerned.

More and more his thoughts reverted to his
old mistress. “ When she smiled, it was a pure
sunshine, that everyone did choose to bask in,
if they could ; but anon came a storm from a
sudden gathering of clouds, and the thunder
fell in wondrous manner on all alike.” Yes !
Those were great times indeed ! And now
... he was “ olde and infirme ” ; he was
forty-five ; he must seek a quiet harbour and
lay up his barque. He lingered at Kelston,
impoverished, racked by various diseases ; he
vainly took the Bath waters ; he became
“stricken of a dead palsy” ; until, in 1612,
at the age of fifty-one, he passed into oblivion.
And in oblivion he has remained. Nobody
reads his Orlando ; his letters are known to
none but a few learned historians ; his little

8

SIR JOHN HARINGTON

books of epigrams lie concealed in the grim
recesses of vast libraries ; and Englishmen
to-day, reflecting on many things, as they
enjoy the benefits of a sanitary system unknown
to the less fortunate inhabitants of other
countries, give never a thought to Sir John
Harington.

9

B

MUGGLETON

Never did the human mind attain such a
magnificent height of self-assertiveness as in
England about the year 1650. Then it was
that the disintegration of religious authority
which had begun with Luther reached its
culminating point. The Bible, containing the
absolute truth as to the nature and the workings
of the Universe, lay open to all ; it was, only
necessary to interpret its assertions ; and to do
so all that was wanted was the decision of
the individual conscience. In those days the
individual conscience decided with extraordinary
facility. Prophets and prophetesses ranged in
crowds through the streets of London, pro-
claiming, with complete certainty, die explana-
tion of everything. The explanations were
extremely varied : so much the better — one
could pick and choose. One could become
a Behmenist, a Bidellian, a Coppinist, a
Salmonist, a Dipper, a Traskitc, a Tryonist, a

10

MUGGLETON

Philadelphian, a Christadelphian, or a Seventh
Day Baptist, just as one pleased. Samuel Butler
might fleer and flout at

petulant, capricious sects,

The maggots of corrupted texts ;

but he, too, was deciding according to the light
of his individual conscience. By what rule
could men determine whether a text was
corrupted, or what it meant? The rule of
the Catholic Church was gone, and hence-
forward Eternal Truth might with perfect
reason be expected to speak through the mouth
of any fish-wife in Billingsgate.

Of these prophets the most famous was
George Fox ; the most remarkable was Lodo-
wick Muggleton. He was born in 1609, and
was brought up to earn his living as a tailor.
Becoming religious, he threw over a charming
girl, with whom he was in love and whom he
was engaged to marry, on the ground that her
mother kept a pawnbroker’s shop and that
usury was sinful. He was persuaded to this by
his puritan friends, among whom was his
cousin, John Reeve, a man of ardent tempera-
ment, fierce conviction, and unflinching holi-

II

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

ness. Some years later, in 1650, two peculiar
persons, John Tawny and John Robins, ap-
peared in London. Tawny declared that he
was the Lord’s high priest, that it was his
mission to lead the Jews back to Jerusalem,
and that, incidentally, he was the King of
France. Robins proclaimed that he was some-
thing greater : he was Adam, he was Melchi-
zedek, he was the Lord himself. He had raised
Jeremiah, Benjamin, and many others from
the dead, and did they not stand there beside
him, admitting that all he said was true?
Serpents and dragons appeared at his com-
mand ; he rode upon the wings of the wind ;
he was about to lead 144,000 men and women
to the Mount of Olives through the Red Sea,
on a diet of dry bread and raw vegetables.
These two men, “ greater than prophets,” made
a profound impression upon Muggleton and his
cousin Reeve. A strange melancholy fell upon
them, and then a more strange exaltation.
They heard mysterious voices ; they were holy ;
why should not they too be inspired ? Greater
than prophets. . . . ? Suddenly Reeve rushed
into Muggleton’s room and declared that they
were the chosen witnesses of the Lord, whose

12

MUGGLETON

appearance had been prophesied in the Book
of Revelation, xi. 3. Muggleton agreed that
it was so. As for Tawny and Robins, they
were devilish impostors, who must be imme-
diately denounced. Sentence of eternal damna-
tion should be passed upon them. The cousins
hurried off on their mission, and discovered
Robins in gaol, where he had been lodged for
blasphemy. The furious embodiment of Adam,
Melchizedek, and the Lord glared out at them
from a window, clutching the bars with both
hands. But Reeve was unabashed. “ That
body of thine,” he shouted, pointing at his
victim, “ which was thy heaven, must be thy
hell ; and that proud spirit of thine, which
said it was God, must be thy Devil. The one
shall be as fire, and the other as brimstone,
burning together to all eternity. This is the
message of the Lord.” The effect was instan-
taneous : Robins, letting go the bars, fell back,
shattered. “ It is finished,” he groaned ; “ the
Lord’s will be done.” He wrote a letter to
Cromwell, recanting ; was released from prison,
and retired into private life, in the depths of
the country. Tawny’s fate was equally impres-
sive. Reeve wrote on a piece of paper, “ We

13

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

pass sentence upon you of eternal damnation,”
and left it in his room. The wretched man
fled to Holland, in a small boat, en route for
Jerusalem, and was never heard of again.

After this the success of the new religion was
assured. But Reeve did not live long to enjoy
his glory. In a few months his fiery spirit had
worn itself away, and Muggleton was left alone
to carry on the work. He was cast in a very
different mould. Tall, thick-set, vigorous, with
a great head, whose low brow, high cheekbones,
and projecting jowl almost suggested some
simian creature, he had never known a day’s
illness, and lived to be eighty-eight. Tough
and solid, he continued, year after year, to
earn his living as a tailor, while the words
flowed from him which were the final revelation
of God. For he preached and lie wrote with
an inexhaustible volubility. He never ceased,
in sermons, in letters, in books, in pamphlets,
to declare to the world the divine and absolute
truth. His revelations might be incomprehen-
sible, his objurgations frenzied, his argumenta-
tions incoherent — no matter ; disciples gathered
round him in ever-thickening crowds, learning,
to their amazement and delight, that there is

14

MUGGLETON

no Devil but the unclean Reason of men, that
Angels are the only beings of Pure Reason, that
God is of the stature of a man and made of flesh
and bone, that Heaven is situated beyond the
stars and six miles above the earth. Schis-
matics might arise, but they were crushed, cast
forth, and sentenced to eternal damnation.
Inquiring magistrates, were browbeaten with
multitudinous texts. George Fox, the miserable
wretch, was overwhelmed — or would have been
had he not obtained the assistance of the Devil
— by thick volumes of intermingled abuse and
Pure Reason. The truth was plain — it had
been delivered to Muggleton by God ; and
henceforward, until the Day of Judgment, the
Deity would hold no further communication
with his creatures. Prayer, therefore, was not
only futile, it was blasphemous ; and no form
of worship was admissible, save the singing of
a few hymns of thanksgiving and praise. All
that was required of the true believer was that
he should ponder upon the Old and the New
Testaments, and upon “ The Third and Last
Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” by
Muggleton.

The English passion for compromise is well

15

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

illustrated by the attitude of Charles the
Second’s Government towards religious hetero-
doxy. There are two logical alternatives for
the treatment of heretics — to let them alone,
or to torture them to death ; but English public
opinion recoiled— it still recoils— from either
course. A compromise was the obvious, the
comfortable solution ; and so it was decided
that heretics should be tortured— not to death,
oh no ! — but ... to some extent. Accord-
ingly, poor Muggleton became a victim, for
years, to the small persecutions of authority.
He was badgered by angry justices, he was
hunted from place to place, his books were
burnt, he was worried by small fines and short
imprisonments. At last, at the age of sixty-
eight, he was arrested and tried for blasphemy.
In the course of the proceedings, it appeared
that the prosecution had made a serious
blunder : since the publication of the book on
which the charge was based an Act of Indem-
nity had been passed. Thereupon the Judge
instructed the jury that, as there was no reason
to suppose that the date on the book was not
a false imprint, the Act of Indemnity did not
apply ; and Muggleton was condemned to the
pillory. He was badly mauled, for it so hap-

16

MUGGLETON

pened that the crowd was hostile and pelted
the old man with stones. After that, he was
set free ; his tribulations were at last over.
The Prophet spent his closing years writing
his autobiography, in the style of the Gospels ;
and he died in peace.

His doctrines did not die with him. Two
hundred and fifty Muggletonians followed him
to the grave, and their faith has been handed
down, unimpaired through the generations,
from that day to this. Still, in the very spot
where their founder was born, the chosen few
meet together to celebrate the two festivals of
their religion — the Great Holiday, on the anni-
versary of the delivery of the Word to Reeve,
and the Little Holiday, on the day of Muggleton’s
final release from prison.

I do believe in God alone.

Likewise in Reeve and Muggleton.

So they have sung for more than two hundred
years.

This is the Muggletonians* faith,

This is the God which we believe ;

None salvation-knowledge hath,

But those of Muggleton and Reeve.

Christ is the Muggletonians* king,

With whom eternally they’ll sing.

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

It is an exclusive faith, certainly ; and yet,
somehow or other, it disarms criticism. Even
though one may not be of the elect oneself,
one cannot but wish it well ; one would be
sorry if the time ever came when there were
no more Muggletonians. Besides, one is happy
to learn that with the passage of years they
have grown more gentle. Their terrible offen-
sive weapon — which, in early days, they wielded
so frequently — has fallen into desuetude : no
longer do they pass sentence of eternal damna-
tion. The dreaded doom was pronounced for
the last time on a Swedcnborgian, with great
effect, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

JOHN AUBREY

If one were asked to choose a date for the be-
ginning of the modern world, probably July 15,
1662, would be the best to fix upon. For on
that day the Royal Society was founded, and
the place of Science in civilization became a
definite and recognized thing. The sun had
risen above the horizon ; and yet, before that,
there had been streaks of light in the sky. The
great age of Newton was preceded by a curious
twilight period — a period of gestation and pre-
paration, confused, and only dimly conscious of
the end towards which it was moving. It might
be called, perhaps, the age of Hobbes, whose
half-mediaeval, half-modern mind was the
dominating influence over intellects which came
to maturity in the middle years of the century.
Another even more typical, though less eminent,
representative of this embryonic generation was
John Aubrey ( 1 626-1697) • Aubrey was among
those chosen by the first President and Council

19

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

to be the first Fellows of the Royal Society ; and
he was extremely proud of the distinction. But
in reality the scientific movement which gave
the Royal Society its significance did not mean
very much to him. His mind moved in a circle
of ideas which was rapidly becoming obsolete,
and which, so long as our civilization lasts, can
never come into existence again.

His life was not a fortunate one. Born a
country gentleman, with estates in Brecknock-
shire, Herefordshire, and Wiltshire, and educated
at Trinity College, Oxford, his happy studies at
the University were interrupted by the Civil
Wars, and his considerable possessions were dissi-
pated in a long series of unsuccessful lawsuits.
In 1666, he tells us, “ all my businesses and
affaires ran kim kam ; nothing tookc effect ” ;
and the words are applicable to the whole of his
life. It was not only luck that was against him ;
he was by nature an amiable muddler ; in love
and in literature, no less than in business, it was
always the same — “ nothing tookc effect.”
Neither Madam Jane Codrington, nor “ that
incomparable good conditioned gentlewoman,
Mris. M. Wiseman, with whom at first sight I
was in love,” would smile upon him • and

20

JOHN AUBREY

though “ domina Katherina Ryves,” with a
dowry of £2,000, was kinder, just as she was
about to marry him she died. He sought dis-
traction abroad, but without success. “ 1664,
in August,” he noted, “ had a terrible fit of
the spleen, and piles, at Orleans.” Yet worse
was to follow : “ In an ill howre,” he began to
make his addresses to Joan Sumner, whose
cruelty was more than negative. She had him
arrested in Chancery Lane, and for three years
pursued him with lawsuits. His ruin followed ;
all his broad lands vanished ; even Easton Piers,
the house of his birth, with its terraced gardens,
its “ jedeau,” its grotto and “ volant Mercury,”
had to be sold ; even his books went at last.
By 1670 poor Aubrey had lost everything. But
then, unexpectedly, happiness descended upon
him. Free at last from the struggles of love and
law and the tedious responsibilities of property,
he found himself in a “ sweet otium .” “ I had
never quiett, nor anything of happiness till
divested of all,” he wrote. “ I was in as much
affliction as a mortall could bee, and never quiet
till all was gone, and I wholly cast myselfe on
God’s providence.”

God’s providence, in Aubrey’s case, took the

21

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

form of a circle of kindly friends, who were ready
enough to give him food and shelter in town and
country, in return for the benefit of his “ most
ingeniose conversation.” He would spend the
winter in London — often with Sir William Petty
or Sir Christopher Wren, — and then, with the
spring, he would ride off on a round of visits —
to Lord Thancl’s in Kent, to the Longs in Wilt-
shire, to Edmund Wylde in Shropshire — until
the autumn came, and he would turn his horse’s
head back to London. Grumpy Anthony Wood
might write him down “ a shiftless person, roving
and magotieheaded, and sometimes little better
than crazed ” ; but his boon companions thought
otherwise. They relished to the full the extra-
ordinary quantity and the delightful variety of
his information, and could never tire of his
engaging manner of presenting it. “ My head,”
he said himself, “ was always working ; never
idle, and even travelling did glean som obser-
vations, of which I have a collection in folio of
2 quiers of paper and a dust basket, some whereof
are to be valued.” His inquiries were indeed
indefatigable ; he was learned in natural history,
geology, Gothic architecture, mineralogy, paint-
ing, heraldry ; he collected statistics, he was a

JOHN AUBREY

profound astrologer, and a learned geome-
trician ; he wrote a treatise on education ; even
the mysteries of cookery did not elude him, and
he compiled “ a collection of approved receipts.”
Before he died he had written sufficient to fill
several volumes ; but, characteristically enough,
he brought only one book to the point of publi-
cation : his Miscellanies, in which he briefly
discussed such fascinating subjects as “ Appari-
tions, Impulses, Knockings, Blows Invisible,
Prophecies, Marvels, Magic, Transportation in
the Air, Visions in a Bevil or Glass, Converse
with Angels and Spirits, Corps-Candles in
Wales, Glances of Love and Envy, and Second-
Sighted Persons in Scotland.” It is in this book,
in the chapter on Apparitions, that the sentence
occurs which so much delighted Mr. Jonathan
Oldbuck of Monkbarns : “ Anno 1670, not far
from Cirencester, was an Apparition ; Being de-
manded, whether a good Spirit, or a bad?
Returned no answer, but disappeared with a
curious Perfume and most melodious Twang.”

Certainly the learned Ray was right when he
said of his friend that he was “ a litde inclinable
to credit strange relations.” Yet it would be
an error to dismiss Aubrey as a mere super-

23

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

stitious trifler ; he was something more interest-
ing than that. His insatiable passion for
singular odds and ends had a meaning in it ; he
was groping towards a scientific ordering of
phenomena ; but the twilight of his age was too
confusing, and he could rarely distinguish be-
tween a fact and a fantasy. He was clever
enough to understand the Newtonian system,
but he was not clever enough to understand that
a horoscope was an absurdity ; and so, in his
crowded curiosity-shop of a brain, astronomy
and astrology both found a place, and were given
equal values. When fortune favoured him,
however, he could make real additions to know-
ledge. He was the first English archaeologist,
and his most remarkable achievement was the
discovery of the hitherto unknown Druidical
temple of Avebury. Encouraged by Charles II,
he made a careful survey of the great stone circle,
writing a dissertation upon it and upon Stone-
henge, and refuting the theory of Inigo Jones,
who, in order to prove that the latter was Roman,
had given an entirely factitious account of it.
As he rode over the Wiltshire downs, hawking
with Colonel Long, he had ample opportunities
for these antiquarian investigations. " Our

24

JOHN AUBREY

sport,” he wrote, “was very good, and in a
romantick countrey, for the prospects are noble
and vast, the downs stockt with numerous flocks
of sheep, the turfe rich and fragrant with thyme
and burnet ; nor are the nut-brown shep-
herdesses without their graces. But the flight
of the falcons was but a parenthesis to the
Colonell’s facetious discourse, who was tarn Marti
quam Mer curio, and the Muses did accompany
him with his hawkes and spaniells.”

The country was charming ; but London too
was full of pleasures, and the winter nights passed
swiftly with wine and talk. For the company
was excellent. There was Robert Hooke “ that
invented the Pendulum-Watches, so much more
useful than the other watches,” and a calculat-
ing machine, and hundreds of other contrivances
— “ he believes not fewer than a thousand ” —
and who declared he had forestalled Mr. Newton;
and there was Dr. Tonge, who had first taught
children to write by means of copper-plates, and
left behind him “ two tomes in folio of alchymy
and Francis Potter, the first to practise the trans-
fusion of blood, who, at to o’clock in the morning
of December io, 1625, as he was going upstairs,
had discovered “ the mysterie of the Beaste ” ;

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

and John Pell, the inventor of the division-sign
in arithmetic, who “ haz sayd to me that he did
believe that he solved some questions non sine
divino auxilio.” And then the gentle gossip went
back to earlier days — to old Mr. Oughtred, Sir
Christopher’s master, who “taught all free,”
and was an astrologer, though he confessed
“ that he was not satisfied how it came about
that one might foretell by the starres, but so it
was,” and whose “ wife was a penurious woman,
and would not allow him to burne candle after
supper, by which meanes many a good notion
is lost, and many a problem unsolved ” ; and
so back to a still more remote and bizarre past—
to Dr. John Dee, of Queen Elizabeth’s time,
“ who wore a gowne like an artist’s gowne, with
hanging sleeves and a slit,” made plates of gold
“ by projection,” and “ used to distil egge-
shells.”

Aubrey lived on into old age — vague, precise,
idle, and busy to the last. His state of life, he
felt, was not quite satisfactory. He was happy ;
but he would have been happier still in some
other world. He regretted the monasteries.
He wished “ the reformers had been more
moderate on that point.” It was “ filt there

26

JOHN AUBREY

should be receptacles and provision for contem-
plative men ” ; and “ what a pleasure ’twould
have been to have travelled from monastery 10
monastery ! ” As it was, he did the next best
thing — he travelled from country house to
country house. In the summer of 1697, when
he was over seventy, as he was riding through
Oxford on his way to Lady Long’s, he was seized
with sudden illness, and his journeying was
ended for ever.

In the great mass of papers that he left behind
him it was hardly to be supposed that there
could be anything of permanent value. Most
of the antique science was already out of date
at his death. But it so happened that Aubrey’s
appetite for knowledge had carried him into a
field of inquiry which, little explored in his own
day, attracts the greatest interest in ours. He
was an assiduous biographer. Partly to help
the ungrateful Anthony Wood in the compila-
tion of his Athenae Oxonienses, but chiefly for
his own delight, Aubrey was in the habit of
jotting down on scraps of paper every piece of
information he could acquire concerning both
his own contemporaries and the English worthies
of previous generations. He was accurate, he

27

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

had an unfailing eye for what was interesting,
and he possessed— it was almost inevitable in
those days — a natural gift of style. The result
is that his Short Lives (which have been
admirably edited for the Clarendon Press by
Mr. Andrew Clark) are not only an authority of
the highest importance upon seventeenth-century
England, but one of the most readable of books.
A biography should cither be as long as Boswell’s
or as short as Aubrey’s. The method of enormous
and elaborate accretion which produced the
Life of Johnson is excellent, no doubt ; but,
failing that, let us have no half-measures ; let
us have the pure essentials — a vivid image, on a
page or two, without explanations, transitions,
commentaries, or padding. This is what Aubrey
gives us ; this, and one thing more — a sense of
the pleasing, anxious being who, with his odd
old alchemy, has transmuted a few handfuls of
orts and relics into golden life.

28

THE LIFE, ILLNESS, AND DEATH
OF DR. NORTH

John North was a man of eminence in his day
— a prebend of Westminster, Professor of Greek
at Cambridge, Master of Trinity College, and
Clerk of the King’s Closet : now totally for-
gotten. Only the curious inquirer, chancing on
the obscure and absurd memoir of him by his
admiring younger brother, Roger, catches a
glimpse of the intense individual existence of
this no longer distinguished man. In the sight
of God, we used to be told, a thousand years are
as a day ; possibly ; but notions of the deity
are not what they were in the days of King
David and Sir Isaac Newton ; Evolution, the
Life Force, and Einstein have all intervened ;
so that whether the dictum is still one to which
credence should be attached is a problem that
must be left to Professor Whitehead (who has
studied the subject very carefully) to determine.
However that may be, for mortal beings the

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

case is different. In their sight (or perhaps one
should say their blindness) a thousand years are
too liable to be not as a day but as just nothing.
The past is almost entirely a blank. The indes-
cribable complexities, the incalculable extrava-
gances, of a myriad consciousnesses have vanished
for ever. Only by sheer accident, when some
particular drop from the ocean of empty water
is slipped under the microscope — only when
some Roger North happens to write a foolish
memoir, which happens to survive, and which
we happen to open — do we perceive for an
amazed moment or two the universe of serried
and violent sensations that lie concealed so
perfectly in the transparency of oblivion.

Bom in 1645, the younger son of an impe-
cunious peer, John North was one of those good
little boys who, in the seventeenth century, were
invariably destined to Learning, the Univer-
sities, and the Church. His goodness, his dili-
gence, his scrupulosity, were perhaps, it is true,
the result of a certain ingrained timidity rather
than anything else ; but that could not be
helped. Fear is not easily exorcised. As an
undergraduate at Cambridge the youth was
still afraid of ghosts in the dark, and slept with

30

LIFE, ILLNESS, AND DEATH OF DR. NORTH

the bedclothes over his head. “ For some time,”
we are told, “ he lay with his Tutor, who once,
coming home, found the Scholar in bed with
only his Crown visible. The Tutor, indiscreetly
enough, pulled him by the Hair ; whereupon
the Scholar sunk down, and the Tutor followed,
and at last, with a great Outcry, the Scholar
sprung up, expecting to see an enorm Spectre.”
But in spite of such contretemps the young man
pursued his studies with exemplary industry.
He was soon a Fellow of his college and a Doctor
of Divinity. He continued to work and work ;
collected a vast library ; read the Classics until
“ Greek became almost vernacular to him ” ;
wrestled with Hebrew, dived deep into Logic
and Metaphysics, and was even “ a Friend to,
though no great Scholar in, the Mathematicks.”
Unwilling to waste a moment of time, the Doctor
found means for turning the most ordinary con-
versations into matter for improvement, but
“ he could not be pleased with such insipid
Pastime as Bowls, or less material Discourse,
such as Town Tales, Punning, and the Like.”
At last his fame as a prodigy of learning spread
over the land. He preached before King
Charles II, and the great Duke of Lauderdale

3i

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

became his patron. At the early age of twenty-
seven, his talents and virtues were rewarded by
the Professorship of Greek in the University of
Cambridge.

His talents and virtues were indeed great ;
but still they were informed and dominated by
an underlying apprehensiveness. Meticulous, in
the true sense of the word, was the nature of the
Doctor. An alarmed exactitude kept him con-
tinually on the stretch. He was in fear alike
for the state of his soul and for his reputation
with posterity. He published only one small
volume — a commentary on some of Plato’s
Dialogues ; all the rest of the multitudinous
fruits of his labours — notes, sermons, treatises,
lectures, dissertations — were burnt, by his direc-
tion, after his death. A small note-book alone
survived by accident, containing the outline of
a great work against Socinians, Republics, and
Hobbes. But the Doctor had taken care to
write on the first page of it — “ I beshrew his
heart, that gathers my opinion from anything
he finds wrote here.” Nor was this strange
diffidence merely literary ; it extended to his
person as well. He would never allow his por-
trait to be painted, in spite of the entreaties of

3«

LIFE, ILLNESS, AND DEATH OF DR. NORTH

Sir Peter Lely ; “ and, what was very odd, he
would not leave the Print in his Bed, where he
had lain, remain undefaced.”

Curiously enough, his appearance seemed to
belie his character. His complexion was florid,
his hair flaxen, and, “ as some used to jest, his
Features were scandalous, as showing rather a
Madam entravestie than a Book-Worm.” At
times, indeed, it almost appeared as if his
features were a truer index to his soul than the
course of his life. His friends were surprised to
see that, among his pupils, he " affected to
refresh himself with the society of the young
Noblemen,” who gathered round him, in fits of
laughter, “ like Younglings about old Silenus.”
He was arch, too, with the ladies, plying them
with raillery. “ Of all the Beasts of the Field,”
he said, “ God Almighty thought Woman the
fittest Companion for Man ” ; and the ladies
were delighted. But unfortunately no corre-
sponding specimen of his jests with the young
noblemen has been preserved.

In 1677, when he was thirty-two, his career
reached its climax, and he was made Master of
Trinity. The magnificent appointment proved
to be his ruin. Faced with the governance of

33

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

the great college over which the omniscient
Barrow had lately ruled and which the presence
of Newton still made illustrious, the Doctor’s
sense of responsibility, of duty, and of inade-
quacy became almost pathological. His days
and his nights passed in one ceaseless round of
devotion, instruction, and administration, read-
ing, writing, and abstemiousness. He had no
longer any time for the young and the fair ; no
time for a single particle of enjoyment ; no
time even for breakfast. His rule was strict
beyond all measure and precedent. With
relentless severity he pursued the undergraduates
through their exercises and punished them for
their peccadilloes. His unpopularity became
intense : he was openly jeered at in the Cloisters,
and one evening a stone came whizzing through
the window of the room in the Lodge where he
was sitting, and fell in the fire at his feet. Nor
was he consoled by the friendship of his equals.
The Senior Fellows were infuriated by his sour
punctilio; a violent feud sprang up ; there were
shocking scenes at the council meetings. “ Let
me be buried in the ante-chapel,” exclaimed
the Master in his desperation, “ so that they
may trample on me dead as they have living.”

34

LIFE, ILLNESS, AND DEATH OF DR. NORTH

And death was always before his eyes ; for
now a settled hypochondria was added to his
other miseries. He was a prey to constant
nightmare. He had little doubt that he would
perish of the stone. Taking upon himself the
functions of the Wise Woman, he displayed
before his embarrassed friends the obvious
symptoms of fatal disorder. “ Gravel ! Red
gravel ! ” he gasped. In reality his actual weak-
ness lay in quite another direction. One day
he caught cold, it grew worse, his throat was
affected, his uvula swelled. The inflammation
continued, and before long the unhappy Doctor
became convinced that his uvula would have
to be cut off. All the physicians of the Univer-
sity were summoned, and they confessed that
the case was grave. It was the age of Moli&re,
and the practitioners of Cambridge might well
have figured in the “ Malade Imaginaire.”
Their prescriptions were terrific and bizarre :
drenches, “ enough to purge a strong man from
off his legs,” accompanied by amber, to be
smoked like tobacco in pipes, with astringent
powders blown into the mouth through quills.
The Doctor, who, with all his voluminous read-
ing, had never heard of Diafoirus, believed every

35

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

word he was told, and carried out the fearful
orders with elaborate conscientiousness. The
result was plain to all ; in a few weeks his health
was completely shattered, and his friends, to
their amazement, saw him “ come helmcted in
Caps upon Caps, and meagre as one newly crope
out of a Fever.” They privately consulted the
great Dr. Lower in London. He threw up his
hands. “ I would undertake,” he said, “ by
the smoak of Amber alone, to put the soundest
Man in the World into Convulsion Fits.” But
it was too late to intervene ; the treatment was
continued, while the Doctor struggled on with
the duties of his office. Two scholars were to
be publicly admonished for scandalous conduct j
the fellows assembled ; the youths stood trem-
bling ; the Master appeared. Emaciated,
ghastly, in his black gown, and with a mountain
of caps upon his head, the extraordinary creature
began a tirade of bitter and virulent reproof ;
when suddenly his left leg swerved beneath him,
and he fell in a fit upon the ground. It was
apoplexy. He was carried to his bed, where
the physicians clustered round him. The one
thing, they declared, that was essential was that
he should never lose consciousness ; if he did

36

LIFE, ILLNESS, AND DEATH OF DR. NORTH

he would never regain it ; and they therefore
ordered that a perpetual noise should be made
about his ears. Whereupon “ there was a Con-
sort of Tongs, Firegrate, Wainscote-Drum, and
dancing of Curtains and Curtain Rings, such
as would have made a sound Man mad.” At
that moment, old Lady North, the patients
mother and a formidable dowager, appeared
upon the scene. She silenced the incredible
tintinnabulation ; she even silenced the faculty ;
and she succeeded in nursing her son back from
death.

Yet there were some who averred that it
would have been better had she never done so.
For now the strangest of the Doctor’s transforma-
tions came upon him. His recovery was not
complete ; his body was paralyzed on the left
side ; but it was in his mind that the most
remarkable change had occurred. His fears
had left him. His scrupulosity, his diffidence,
his seriousness, even his morality — all had
vanished. He lay on his bed, in reckless levity,
pouring forth a stream of flippant observations,
and naughty stories, and improper jokes. While
his friends hardly knew which way to look, he
laughed consumedly, his paralyzed features

37

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

drawn up into a curiously distorted grin. He
sent for a gay young scholar of the college, Mr.
Warren, to sit by him and regale him with merry
tales and readings from light romances. And
there was worse still to follow. Attacked by
epileptic seizures, he declared that the only
mitigation of his sufferings lay in the continued
consumption of wine. He, who had been so
noted for his austerities, now tossed off, with
wild exhilaration, glass after glass of the strongest
sherry ; the dry ascetic had become a convert
to the golden gospel of la dive bouteille. In the
depth of the night, the studious precincts of the
Great Court of Trinity were disturbed by
peculiar sounds — the high, triumphant, one-
sided cackle of the Master, as he lay, with his
flagon in his hand and young Mr. Warren beside
him, absorbed in the abandoned, exuberant
fantasies of the Cure of Meudon.

After four years of this strange existence, (lie
Doctor died in his sleep. He was buried, as he
had directed, in the ante-chapel of the college,
where, under a small square stone, engraved with
the initials “ J. N.,” so many singular agitations
came to their final rest. In his brother Roger’s
opinion, “ the Consciousness of a well-spent Life

38

LIFE, ILLNESS, AND DEATH OF DR. NORTH

was of great service to him,” for otherwise he
“ might have fallen into Melancholy, Dejections,
Despair, and Misconstructions of Providence.”
And probably Roger was right ; conscientious-
ness is apt, in however devious a manner, to
have its reward in this world. Whether it also
has it in any other is another of those questions
that must be referred to Professor Whitehead.

39

CONGREVE, COLLIER, MACAULAY,
AND MR. SUMMERS

As the Victorian Age grows dim on the horizon,
various neglected luminaries re-cmerge — among
others the comic dramatists of the Restoration.
The work of Sheridan begins to be taken at
its true value — as a clever but emasculated rifa-
cimento ; the supreme master of prose comedy
in English is seen to be Congreve. At least,
let us hope so. To those who are still in doubt,
or in ignorance, the new complete edition of
Congreve’s works, published by the Nonesuch
Press, and edited by Mr. Montague Summers,
should bring conviction or conversion. Con-
greve now appears for the first time as he
should have appeared long ago — as a classic.
The get-up of these four quarto volumes —
though it cannot be said to equal the perfect
amenity of the Baskerville edition of 1761 — is
admirable ; and the critical prefaces, notes,

40

CONGREVE, COLLIER, MACAULAY, ETC.

and commentaries are a monument of erudi-
tion and exactitude. Mr. Summers prints the
plays, probably rightly, from the original edi-
tions, and not from the last edition published
during the author’s lifetime, which has formed
the basis of all subsequent texts. He thus
restores to life several excellent jokes, deleted
by Congreve owing to the attacks of Jeremy
Collier, though he does so at the cost of rele-
gating various small improvements and polish-
ings to the list of variants ; but no doubt— if
one must choose — polishings are less valuable
than jokes. Another decided gain is the rever-
sion to the original arrangement of the scenes,
which had been unnecessarily Frenchified by
Congreve himself, and had subsequently under-
gone a process of serious degradation — still
unfortunately visible in the current “ Mermaid”
edition. Mr. Summers’s interesting introduc-
tion is full of learning, argument, and feeling
— in fact, perhaps too full. There is an idiosyn-
cratic exuberance about it, which sorts ill with
the exquisite impersonality of Congreve. To
speak of “ the disastrous Revolution of 1688,”
for instance, and to describe the Lollards as
“ Wyclifs gang,” is odd ; and oddity should

41

D

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

not appear in Congreve’s editor. One small
point may be mentioned, as an illustration of
the dangers which attend an excess of zeal :
“ ’Tis true we found you and Mr. Fainall in
the blue garret,” says Mincing, the lady’s maid,
to Mrs. Marwood ; “by the same token, you
swore us to secrecy upon Mcssalina’s Poems.”
Mr. Summers has the following note : Messa-

lina’s Poems.’ Considerable research has failed
to trace this book. It is alluded to before as
* a Book of Verses and Poems,’ and I would
suggest that it was a collection of obscene lyrics
and songs clandestinely printed.” Alas, for
Mr. Summers’s “ considerable research ” ! A
word with Millamant would have brought light
in a moment. For the explanation is as simple
as it is delightful : Mincing had got the tide
of the “ Book of Verses and Poems ” just a little
wrong ; instead of “ Messalina’s,” she should
have said “ Miscellaneous.”

The difficulty of distinguishing between what
is Miscellaneous and what is Mcssalina’s is not
confined to Mincing. The dividing line has
never been absolutely drawn, and learned
Magistrates are worried with the question to
this hour. But at the end of the seventeenth

42

CONGREVE, COLLIER, MACAULAY, ETC.

cenlury discussions upon ethics and Esthetics
were even more confused and confusing than
they are at the present day. For one thing,
there were more red herrings on the track.
The divine and mysterious requirements of
dogmatic theology had to be attended to — so
had the almost equally divine and mysterious
pronouncements of Aristotle. Jeremy Collier,
however, was troubled with no doubts. He
saw Messalina everywhere ; and, in his Short
View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the
English Stage, published in 1698, he singled
out the dramatists of the time for a violent
castigation. To a modern reader, Collier’s
book is nothing but a curiosity, its only merit
being, oddly enough, an Esthetic one — it is
written in good plain English. The arguments
throughout are grotesque, and it is clear that
Collier had never stopped for two minutes to
consider the general questions at issue. He
supports his contentions by appeals to Tertul-
lian, Minutius Felix, St. Chrysostom, and “ the
Bishop of Arras ” ; the ancient drama, he
gravely maintains, was less scurrilous than the
modem — did not Sophocles show the deepest
respect for oracles? As for his conception of

43

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

what constitutes stage immorality, it is most
extraordinary. Any opinion held by any cha-
racter in a play is assumed to be the author’s.
Congreve is seriously pronounced to be obscene
and blasphemous because he makes his gentle-
men say “ Pox on’t,” and his ladies “ Jesu ! ”
while Dryden is savagely hectored for “ abusing
the clergy” because in one of his plays an
Egyptian Princess rails at the priests of Apis.
Obviously, this absurd volume lay open to
more than one crushing rejoinder. Several re-
joinders were made ; but their ineptitude is
symptomatic of the age ; and the most inept
of all was Congreve’s, With a strange perver-
sity the wittiest man alive made a complete
fool of himself by rushing into the one position
that was untenable. He maintained that his
plays were not indecent, but that, on the con-
trary, they were written to subserve the highest
ends of virtue. He, too, actually appealed to the
Early Fathers. It is impossible to decide which
of the two antagonists is the more ridiculous —
Collier when he fiercely anathematizes Congreve
for calling a coachman Jehu, or Congreve when
he blandly assumes that there is nothing
improper in Lady Plyant and Mr. Scandal.

44

CONGREVE, COLLIER, MACAULAY, ETC.

Unluckily, the true nature of this preposterous
controversy has become obscured by Macaulay.
In an essay, written in that style which, with
its metallic exactness and its fatal efficiency,
was certainly one of the most remarkable pro-
ducts of the Industrial Revolution, Macaulay
has impressed upon the mind of the ordinary
reader his own version of the affair. Wishing
to make a dramatic story of it, with a satis-
factory moral, he has presented Collier' as a
hero — not, to be sure, without his little short-
comings, but still a hero — who, in the twinkling
of an eye, purged not only the English theatre,
but English literature itself, of the deplorable
and reprehensible grossness which had been
disgracing the country for the last forty years.
A few inconvenient facts are forgotten — the
fact, for instance, that the Restoration Comedies
continued to be acted unceasingly throughout
the eighteenth century. But, no doubt, it is to
the moral revolution effected by the Short View
that we owe the exquisite propriety of the farces
of Fielding and the chaste refinements of
Gulliver's Travels and the Dunciad,

One of the wildest of Macaulay’s aberrations
is his picture of Collier as a great humorist.

45

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

As Mr. Summers observes, an utter — a devas-
tating — a positively unnerving lack of humour
is the most conspicuous feature of the Short
View. Yet Macaulay has the effrontery to
mention Pascal in connection with this egregi-
ous jackass. He was gambling heavily on none
of his readers having the curiosity to open
the book.

Whether Mr. Summers’s account of the dis-
pute will supersede Macaulay’s seems to be a
little doubtful. He is, perhaps, too much of a
partisan. His unwillingness to admit the weak-
ness of Congreve’s arguments diminishes the
force of his denunciation of Collier’s. In truth,
the question is not so simple. No doubt, as
Mr. Summers says, art and life are different
things ; but wherein precisely lies the dif-
ference? Later, Mr. Summers justifies the
comedies of the Restoration on the ground that
they were a truthful representation of life as it
was lived in the high society of the time. “ A
close parallel,” he adds, " may be found in the
decadence of Venice.” Surely he might have
pushed the comparison a little further— as far
as the present day. One can easily think of
a Mr. Tattle in Bloomsbury, and a Lady Froth

46

CONGREVE, COLLIER, MACAULAY, ETC.

in Mayfair. Nevertheless, it is plainly para-
doxical to find in The Double Dealer or The Way
of the World a faithful presentment of any state
of society ; it is not in that fashion that real
life is lived. What, then, is the explanation of
this close resemblance combined with this obvi-
ous unlikeness? How is it that we are well
acquainted with Mrs. Frail, without for a
moment supposing that either she or ourselves
are figuring in a Congreve comedy ? Perhaps
the truth is that pure Comedy, unlike Tragedy
and Drama and most forms of fiction, depends
for its existence on the construction of a con-
ventional world in which, while human nature
and human actions are revealed, their con-
sequences are suspended. The characters in
Comedy are real ; but they exist in vacuo.
They are there neither to instruct us nor to
exalt us, but simply to amuse us ; and there-
fore the effects which would in reality follow
from their conduct must not appear. If they
did, the comedy would cease to exist : the
jealous husband would become a tragic per-
sonage ; the heavy father a Galsworthy cha-
racter ; the rake would be revealed as a pest,
and the old bore as ... an old bore. By the

47

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

magic of Comedy, what is scabrous, what is
melancholy, what is vicious, and what is tire-
some in the actual life of society is converted
into charming laughter and glittering delight.

This being so, it is as futile for the comic
writer to pretend that he is, in reality, a moralist
in disguise, as it is for the moralist to blame
the comic writer for ignoring morality. The
true weight of the moral objection lies in a
very different consideration. It is perfectly
possible that the presentation of such spectacles
as Comedy presents may prove, in certain
circumstances, undermining to the virtue of
the spectators. But it is obvious that here no
general rule can be laid down ; everything
depends upon contingencies. The time, the
place, the shifting significations of words, the
myriad dispositions of the audience or the
reader — all these things are variables which
can never be reduced to a single formula.
Qjxeen Caroline’s meat was Qjieen Victoria’s
poison ; and perhaps Lord Macaulay’s poison
was Mr. Aldous Huxley’s pap. Every case
must be considered on its own merits ; but,
after all, in any case, such considerations have
no bearing upon the intrinsic excellence of

48

CONGREVE, COLLIER, MACAULAY, ETC.

works of art. Fireworks do not cease to be
exhilarating and beautiful because it is danger-
ous for inexperienced governesses to play with
them. The comedies of Congreve must be
ranked among the most wonderful and glorious
creations of the human mind, although it is
quite conceivable that, in certain circumstances,
and at a given moment, a whole bench of
Bishops might be demoralized by their perusal.

49

MADAME DE SEVIGNE’S COUSIN

Madame de S£vign£ was one of those chosen
beings in whom the forces of life are so abund-
ant and so glorious that they overflow in every
direction and invest whatever they meet with
the virtue of their own vitality. She was the
sun of a whole system, which lived in her light
— which lives still for us with a kind of reflected
immortality. We can watch — with what a
marvellous distinctness ! — the planets revolving
through that radiance — the greater and the
less, and the subordinate moons and dimmest
asteroids — from Madame de Grignan herself
to the dancing gypsies at Vichy. But then,
when the central luminary is withdrawn, what
an incredible convulsion ! All vanish ; we are
dimly aware for a little of some obscure shapes
moving through strange orbits ; and after that
there is only darkness.

Emmanuel de Goulanges, for instance. He
lived a long life, filled his own place in the

50

MADAME DE SfiVIGNfi’S COUSIN

world, married, travelled, had his failures and
his successes . . . but all those happenings were
mere phenomena ; the only reality about him
lay in one thing— he was Madame de SSvignd’s
cousin. He was born when she was seven
years old, and he never knew a time when he
had not loved her. She had petted the little
creature when it was a baby, and she had gone
on petting it all her life. He had not been
quite an ordinary child : he had had strange
fancies. There was a fairy, called Cafut, so he
declared, to whom he was devoted ; this was
not approved of— it looked like incipient mad-
ness ; and several whippings had to be adminis-
tered before Cafut was exorcized. In reality, no
one could have been saner than the little
Emmanuel ; but he had ways of amusing
himself which seemed unaccountable to the
grandly positive generation into which he had
been bom. There was something about him
which made him no fit contemporary of Bossuet.
Madame de S6vign6, so completely, so magni-
ficently, a child of her age, while she loved him,
could never take him quite seriously. In her eyes,
though he might grow old, he could not grow
up. At the age of sixty, white-haired and

5i

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

gouty, he remained for her what, in fact, his
tiny pink-cheeked rotundity suggested — an in-
fant still. She found him adorable and unim-
portant. Even his sins — and in those days sins
were serious — might, somehow or other, be
disregarded ; and besides, she observed that
he had only one — it was gaudeamus ; she scolded
him with a smile. It was delightful to have
anything to do with him — to talk with him,
to laugh at him, to write to him. “ Le style
qu’on a en lui ^crivant,” she said, “ ressemblc
k la joie et h la sante.” It was true ; and some
of her most famous, some of her most delicious
and life-scattering letters were written to her
cousin Goulanges.

He married well — a lady who was related to
the great Louvois ; but the connection did him
little good in the world. For a moment, indeed,
an important public office was dangled before
his eye« ; but it was snapped up by somebody
else, and Goulanges, after a few days of dis-
appointment, consoled himself easily enough
— with a song. He was very fond of songs,
composing them with elegant rapidity to the
popular airs of the day ; every circumstance
of his existence, however grave or however

5a

MADAME DE SfiVIGNfi’S COUSIN

trivial— a journey, a joke, the world’s cruelties,
his wife’s infidelities — he rigged them all out
in the bows and ribbons of his little rhymes.
His wife was pretty, gay, fashionable, and
noted for her epigrams. Her adorers were
numerous : there was the Comte de Brancas,
famous — immortal, even, as he has his niche in
La Bruyere’s gallery — for his absentmindedness ;
there was the Abbe Tetu, remarkable for two
things— for remaining the friend both of Madame
de Montespan and of Madame de Maintenon,
and for being the first person who was ever
afflicted by the vapours ; and there was the
victorious — the scandalously victorious —
Marquis de la Trousse. Decidedly the lady
was gay — too gay to be quite to the taste of
Madame de S6vign6, who declared that she
was a leaf fluttering in the wind. “ Cette
feuille,” she said, “ est la plus frivole et la plus
leg£re marchandise que vous ayez jamais
vue.” But Coulanges was indifferent to her
lightness ; what he did feel was her inordinate
success at Court. There she gadded, in a blaze
of popularity, launching her epigrams and
hobnobbing with Madame de Maintenon ; he
was out of it ; and he was growing old, and

53

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

the gout attacked him in horrid spasms. At
times he was almost sad.

Then, gradually and for no apparent reason,
there was a change. What was it? Was the
world itself changing ? Was one age going out
and another coming in ? From about the year
1690 onwards, one begins to discern the first
signs of the petrifaction, the rigor mortis of the
great epoch of Louis XIV ; one begins to
detect, more and more clearly in the circum-
ambient atmosphere, the scent and savour of
the eighteenth century. Already there had
been symptoms — there had been the fairy Cafut ,
and the Abb6 Tetu’s vapours. But now there
could be no more doubt about it ; the new
strange tide was flowing steadily in. And upon
it was wafted the cockleshell of Goulanges. At
fifty-seven, he found that he had come into his
own. No longer was he out of it — far from it :
his was now the popularity, the inordinate
success. He was asked everywhere, and he
always fitted in. His songs particularly, his
frivolous neat little songs, became the rage j
they flew from mouth to mouth ; and the
young people, at all the fashionable parties,
danced as they sang them. At last they were

54

MADAME DE SEVIGNfi’S COUSIN

collected by some busybody and printed, to his
fury and delight ; and his celebrity was re-
doubled. At the same time a wonderful reju-
venation came upon him ; he seemed to grow
younger daily ; he drank, he guzzled, with
astonishing impunity ; there must have been a
mistake, he said, in his birth certificate — it was
ante-dated at least twenty years. As for his
gout, it had gone for ever ; he had drowned it
by bathing, when he was over sixty, all one
summer in the Seine. Madame de S6vign£
could only be delighted. She had given a
great deal of thought to the matter, she told
him, and she had come to the conclusion that
he was the happiest man in the world. Pro-
bably she was right — she almost always was.
But, oddly enough, while Goulanges was under-
going this transformation, a precisely contrary
one had befallen his wife. She had, in sober
truth, grown old — old, and disillusioned, and
serious. She could bear the Court no longer
— she despised it ; she wavered between piety
and stoicism ; quietly, persistently, she with-
drew into herself. Madame de Sdvignd, philo-
sophizing and quoting La Fontaine, found — it
was surprising — that she admired her— the poor

55

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

brown leaf; and, on her side, Madame de
Coulanges grew more and more devoted to
Madame de Sdvign£. Her husband mildly
amused her. As she watched him flying from
country-house to country-house, she suggested
that it would save time and trouble if he lived
in a swing, so that he might whirl backwards
and forwards for the rest of his days, without
ever having to touch the earth again. “ CTest
toujours son plaisir qui le gouvcrne,” she ob-
served, with an ironical smile ; “ ct il est

hcureux : en faut-il davantage ? ” Apparently
not. Coulanges, adored by beautiful young
Duchesses, disputed over by enormously wealthy
Dowagers, had nothing left to wish for. The
gorgeous Cardinal de Bouillon took him up —
so did the Due de Bouillon, and the Chevalier
— all the Bouillons, in fact ; it was a delightful
family. The Cardinal carried him off to his
country palace, where there was music all day
long, and the servants had the air of noblemen,
and the ragouts reached a height of ecstatic
piquancy — ragouts from every country in Europe,
it seemed — how they understood each other
when they came together on his plate, he had
no idea — but no matter ; he ate them all.

56

MADAME DE SfiVIGNfi’S COUSIN

In the midst of this, the inevitable and the
unimaginable happened : Madame de S6vign£
died. The source of order, light, and heat was
no more ; the reign of Chaos and Old Night
descended. One catches a hurried vision of
Madame de Grignan, pale as ashes, elaborating
sentences of grief; and then she herself and
all her belongings — her husband, her son, her
castle, with its terraces and towers, its Canons,
its violins, its Mistral, its hundred guests — are
utterly abolished. For a little longer, through
a dim penumbra, Coulanges and his wife remain
just visible. She was struck down — over-
whelmed with grief and horror. Was it possible,
was it really possible, that Madame de S^vigne
was dead? She could hardly believe it. It
was a reversal of nature. Surely it could not
be. She sat alone, considering life and death,
silent, harrowed, and sceptical, while her
husband — ah ! even her husband felt this blow.
The little man wrote a piteous letter to Madame
de Grignan’s daughter, young Madame de
Simiane, and tears blotted the page. He was
only a shadow now — all too well he knew it ;
and yet even shadows must obey the law of
their being. In a few weeks he wrote to Madame

57

E

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

de Simiane again ; he was more cheerful ; he
was staying with Madame de Louvois in her
house at Ghoisy, a truly delicious abode ; but
Madame de Simiane must not imagine that he
did not pass many moments, in spite of all the
company, in sad remembrance of his friend.
A few weeks more, and he was dancing ; the
young people danced, and why should not he,
who was as young as the youngest? All the
Bouillons were in the house. The jigging vision
grows fainter ; but a few years later one sees
him at the height of his felicity, having been
provided by one of his kind friends with a room
in the Palace at Versailles. More years pass,
he is very old, he is very poor, but what does
it matter ? —

Je connais de plus en plus
En faisant tr^s-grande ch&re,

Qu’un estomac qui digfere
Vaut plus de cent mille dcus.

On his seventy-sixth birthday he sings and
dances, and looks forward to being a hundred
without any difficulty at all. Then he eats
and drinks, and sings and dances again. And
so he disappears.

But Madame de Coulanges, ever sadder and

58

MADAME DE SEVIGNE’S COUSIN

more solitary, stayed in her room, thinking,
hour after hour, over the fire. The world was
nothing to her ; success and happiness nothing ;
heaven itself nothing. She pulled her long fur-
trimmed taffeta gown more closely round her,
and pushed about the embers, wondering, for
the thousandth time, whether it was really
possible that Madame de S6vign£ was dead.

59

THE SAD STORY OF
DR. COLBATCH

The Rev. Dr. Colbatch could not put up with
it any more. Animated by the highest motives,
he felt that he must intervene. The task was
arduous, odious, dangerous ; his antagonist
most redoubtable ; but Dr. Colbatch was a
Doctor of Divinity, Professor of Casuistry in the
University of Cambridge, a Senior Fellow of
Trinity College, and his duty was plain ; the
conduct of the Master could be tolerated no
longer ; Dr. Bentley must go.

In the early years of the eighteenth century
the life of learning was agitated, violent, and full
of extremes. Everything about it was on the
grand scale. Erudition was gigantic, con-
troversies were frenzied, careers were punctuated
by brutal triumphs, wild temerities, and dreadful
mortifications. One sat, bent nearly double,
surrounded by four circles of folios, living to edit
Hesychius and confound Dr. Hody, and dying

60

THE SAD STORY OF DR. COLBATCH

at last with a stomach half-full of sand. The
very names of the scholars of those days had
something about them at once terrifying and
preposterous : there was Graevius, there was
Wolfius, there was Cruquius ; there were Tor-
rentius and Rutgersius ; there was the gloomy
Baron de Stosch, and there was the deplorable
De Pauw. But Richard Bentley was greater
than all these. Combining extraordinary know-
ledge and almost infinite memory with an
acumen hardly to be distinguished from inspira-
tion, and a command of logical precision which
might have been envied by mathematicians or
generals in the field, he revivified with his
daemonic energy the whole domain of classical
scholarship. The peer of the mightiest of his
predecessors — of Scaliger, of Casaubon — turning,
in skilful strength, the magic glass of science, he
brought into focus the world’s comprehension
of ancient literature with a luminous exactitude
of which they had never dreamed. His prowess
had first declared itself in his Dissertation upon
the Epistles of Phalaris, in which he had obliter-
ated under cartloads of erudition and ridicule
the miserable Mr. Boyle. He had been rewarded,
in the year 1700, when he was not yet forty, with

61

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

the Mastership of Trinity ; and then another
side of his genius had appeared. It became
evident that he was not merely a scholar, that
he was a man of action and affairs, and that
he intended to dominate over the magnificent
foundation of Trinity with a command as abso-
lute as that which he exercised over questions
in Greek grammar. He had immediately
gathered into his own hands the entire control
of the College ; he had manipulated the statutes,
rearranged the finances, packed the Council ;
he had compelled the Society to rebuild and
redecorate, at great expense, his own Lodge ;
he had brought every kind of appointment —
scholarships, fellowships, livings — to depend
simply upon his will. The Fellows murmured
and protested in vain ; their terrible tyrant
treated them with scant ceremony. “ You will
die in your shoes ! ” he had shouted at one
tottering Senior who had ventured to oppose
him ; and another fat and angry old gentleman
he had named “ The College Dog.” In fact,
he treated his opponents as if they had been
corrupt readings in an old manuscript. At last
there was open war. The leading Fellows had
appealed to the Visitor of the College, the Bishop

62

THE SAD STORY OF DR. COLBATGH

of Ely, to remove the Master ; and the Master
had replied by denying the Bishop’s competence
and declaring that the visitatorial power lay
with the Grown. His subtle mind had detected
an ambiguity in the Charter ; the legal position
was, indeed, highly dubious ; and for five years,
amid indescribable animosities, he was able to
hold his enemies at bay. In the meantime, he
had not been idle in other directions : he had
annihilated Le Glerc, who, ignorant of Greek,
was rash enough to publish a Menander ; he
had produced a monumental edition of Horace ;
and he had pulverized Freethinking in the
person of Anthony Collins. But his foes had
pressed upon him ; and eventually it had seemed
that his hour was come. In 1714 he had been
forced to appear before the Bishop’s court ; his
defence had been weak ; the Bishop had drawn
up a judgment of deprivation. Then there had
been a coup de thidtre. The Bishop had suddenly
died before delivering judgment. All the pre-
vious proceedings lapsed, and Bentley ruled
once more supreme in Trinity.

It was at this point that the Rev. Dr. Colbatch,
animated by the highest motives, felt that he
must intervene. Hitherto he had filled the rSle

63

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

of a peacemaker ; but now the outrageous pro-
ceedings of the triumphant Master — who, in
the flush of victory, was beginning to expel hostile
Fellows by force from the College, and had even
refused to appoint Dr. Colbatch himself to the
Vice-Mastership — called aloud for the resistance
of every right-thinking man. And Dr. Colbatch
flattered himself that he could resist to some
purpose. He had devoted his life to the study
of the law ; he was a man of the world ; he
was acquainted with Lord Carteret ; and he
had written a book on Portugal. Accordingly,
he hurried to London and interviewed great
personages, who were all of them extremely
sympathetic and polite ; then he returned to
Trinity, and, after delivering a fulminating
sermon in the chapel, he bearded the Master at
a College meeting, and actually had the nerve
to answer him back. Just then, moreover, the
tide seemed to be turning against the tyrant.
Bentley, not content with the battle in his own
College, had begun a campaign against the
University. There was a hectic struggle, and
then the Vice-Chancellor, by an unparalleled
exercise of power, deprived Bentley of his
degrees : the Master of Trinity College and the

64

THE SAD STORY OP DR. COLBATCH

Regius Professor of Divinity was reduced to the
status of an undergraduate. This delighted
the heart of Dr. Golbatch. He flew to London,
where Lord Carteret, as usual, was all smiles
and agreement. When, a little later, the College
living of Orewell fell vacant, Dr. Colbatch gave
a signal proof of his power ; for Bentley, after
refusing to appoint him to the living, at last
found himself obliged to give way. Dr, Colbatch
entered the rectory in triumph ; was it not clear
that that villain at the Lodge was a sinking man ?
But, whether sinking or no, the villain could still
use a pen to some purpose. In a pamphlet on
a proposed edition of the New Testament,
Bentley took occasion to fall upon Dr. Colbatch
tooth and nail. The rector of Orewell was “ a
casuistic drudge,” a “ plodding pupil of
Escobar,” an insect, a snarling dog, a gnawing
rat, a maggot, and a cabbage-head. His
intellect was as dark as his countenance ; his
“ eyes, muscles, and shoulders were wrought
up into the most solemn posture of gravity ” ;
he grinned horribly ; he was probably mad j
and his brother’s beard was ludicrously long.

On this Dr. Colbatch, chattering with rage,
brought an action against the Master for libel

65

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

in the Court of the Vice-Chancellor. By a
cunning legal device Bentley arranged that the
action should be stopped by the Court of King’s
Bench. Was it possible that Dr. Colbatch’s
knowledge of the law was not impeccable ? He
could not believe it, and forthwith composed a
pamphlet entitled Jus Academicum, in which
the whole case, in all its bearings, was laid before
the public. The language of the pamphlet was
temperate, the references to Bentley were not
indecently severe ; but, unfortunately, in one
or two passages some expressions seemed to
reflect upon the competence of the Court of
King’s Bench. The terrible Master saw his
opportunity. He moved the Court of King’s
Bench to take cognizance of the Jus Acade-
micum as a contempt of their jurisdiction.
A cold shiver ran down Dr. Colbatch’s spine.
Was it conceivable ? . . . But no ! He had
friends in London, powerful friends, who would
never desert him. He rushed to Downing
Street ; Lord Townshend was reassuring ; so
was the Lord Chief Justice ; and so was the
Lord Chancellor. “ Here,” said Lord Carteret,
waving a pen, “ is the magician’s wand that will
always come to the rescue of Dr. Colbatch.”

66

THE SAD STORY OF DR. GOLBATCH

Surely all was well. Nevertheless, he was sum-
moned to appear before the Court of King’s
Bench in order to explain his pamphlet. The
judge was old and testy ; he misquoted Horace
— “Jura negat sibi nata, nihil non abrogat” ;
“ Arrogat, my lord ! ” said Dr. Colbatch. A
little later the judge once more returned to the
quotation, making the same error. “ Arrogat ,
my lord ! ” cried Dr. Colbatch for the second
time. Yet once again, in the course of his
summing-up, the judge pronounced the word
“ abrogat ” ; “ Arrogat, my lord ! ” screamed,
for the third time, Dr. Colbatch. The inter-
ruption was fatal. The unhappy man was fined
£50 and imprisoned for a week.

A less pertinacious spirit would have collapsed
under such a dire misadventure ; but Dr.
Colbatch fought on. For ten years more, still
animated by the highest motives, he struggled
to dispossess the Master. Something was gained
when yet another Bishop was appointed to the
See of Ely — a Bishop who disapproved of
Bentley’s proceedings. With indefatigable zeal
Dr. Colbatch laid the case before the Bishop of
London, implored the Dean and Chapter of
Westminster to interfere, and petitioned the

67

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

Privy Council. In 1729 the Bishop of Ely sum-
moned Bentley to appear before him ; where-
upon Bentley appealed to the Crown to decide
who was the Visitor of Trinity College. For a
moment Dr. Colbatch dreamed of obtaining a
special Act of Parliament to deal with his enemy ;
but even he shrank from such a desperate ex-
pedient ; and at length, in 1732, the whole case
came up for decision before the House of Lords.
At that very moment Bentley published his
edition of Paradise Lost, in which all the best
passages were emended and rewritten — a book
remarkable as a wild aberration of genius, and
no less remarkable as containing, for the first
time in print, “ tow’ring o’er the alphabet like
Saul,” the great Digamma. If Bentley’s object
had been to impress his judges in his favour, he
failed ; for the House of Lords decided that the
Bishop of Ely was the Visitor. Once more
Bentley was summoned to Ely House. Dr.
Colbatch was on tenterhooks ; the blow was
about to fall ; nothing could avert it now,
unless — he trembled — if the Bishop were to die
again? But the Bishop did not die ; in 1734
he pronounced judgment ; he deposed Bentley.

So, after thirty years, a righteous doom had

68

THE SAD STORY OF DR. COLBATGH

fallen upon that proud and wicked man. Dr.
Colbatch’s exultation was inordinate : it was
only equalled, in fact, by his subsequent horror,
indignation, and fury. For Bentley had dis-
covered in the Statutes of the College a clause
which laid it down that, when the Master was
to be removed, the necessary steps were to be
taken by the Vice-Master. Now the Vice-
Master was Bentley’s creature ; he never took
the necessary steps ; and Bentley never ceased,
so long as he lived, to be Master of Trinity.
Dr. Colbatch petitioned the House of Lords, he
applied to the Court of King’s Bench, he be-
seeched Lord Carteret — all in vain. His head
turned ; he was old, haggard, dying. Tossing
on his bed at Orewell, he fell into a delirium ;
at first his mutterings were inarticulate ; but
suddenly, starting up, a glare in his eye, he
exclaimed, with a strange emphasis, to the utter
bewilderment of the bystanders, “ Arrogat, my
lord ! ” and immediately expired.

69

THE PRESIDENT DE BROSSES

A charming and sometimes forgotten feature of
the world as it used to be before the age of trains
and telephones was the provincial capital.
When Edinburgh was as far from London as
Vienna is to-day, it was natural — it was inevit-
able — that it should be the centre of a local
civilization, which, while it remained politically
and linguistically British, developed a colour
and a character of its own. In France there
was the same pleasant phenomenon. Bordeaux,
Toulouse, Aix-en-Provence — up to the end of
the eighteenth century each of these was in truth
a capital, where a peculiar culture had grown
up that was at once French and idiosyncratic.
An impossibility to-day ! It is hard to believe,
as one whisks through Dijon in a tram, that
here, a hundred and fifty years ago, was the
centre of a distinct and vigorous civilization —
until, perhaps, one leaves the tram, and turns
aside into the rue de la Prefecture. Ah ! One

70

THE PRESIDENT DE BROSSES

has come upon a vanished age. The houses, so
solid and yet so vivacious, with their cobbled
courts and coloured tiles, seem to be withdrawn
into an aristocratic resignation. Memory and
forgetfulness are everywhere. It is the moment
to reflect upon the President de Brosses.

Dijon, the capital of Burgundy, had become
in the eighteenth century pre-eminently a city
of magistrates. There the provincial parlement
assembled and the laws were administered by
the hereditary judges, the nobility of the long
robe, whose rule was more immediate, more
impressive, and almost more powerful, than the
King’s. Charles de Brosses was born into this
aristocracy, and grew up to be a perfect repre-
sentative of its highest traditions. He was
extremely intelligent, admirably conscientious,
and crammed full of life. He was at once a wit,
a scholar, a lawyer, and a man of the world.
He resembled the generous wine of the country
in his combination of gay vitality with richness
and strength. His tiny figure and his satirical
face lost in the forest of a judicial wig might
prompt to laughter — “ the corners of one’s
mouth,” said Diderot, “ couldn’t help going up
when one looked at him ” ; but he was impres-

7i

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

sive on the bench ; and, late in life, was to prove
his patriotism by his intrepid resistance when
the privileges of his province were attacked by
the royal authority. In his leisure, he devoted
himself to every kind of literary and scientific
work. A tour in Italy produced a series of
amusing letters, which, published posthumously,
are still read and remembered ; his book on
the newly discovered Herculaneum (1750) was
the first on the subject ; his Histoire des naviga-
tions des Terns Australes (1756) was of use to
both Cook and Bougainville ; his Culte des
Dieux Fitiches (1760) contained a curious specula-
tion on the origin of the religion of Egypt ; his
Traite de la formation micanique des langues (1765)
was the earliest attempt at a science of etym-
ology ; and his labours were concluded with
an elaborate edition of Sallust (1777) upon
which he had worked for thirty years. The
growth of knowledge has converted his researches
and his speculations into mere curiosities ; but
it was natural that the citizens of Dijon should
have honoured him as one of their most splendid
luminaries, and that the President de Brasses
should have been compared in his day to that
other great provincial figure of a previous genera-

7a

THE PRESIDENT DE BROSSES

tion — the President de Montesquieu. Of course,
though Dijon was select and Dijon was magni-
ficent, it had to be admitted that there did exist
a higher tribunal, at whose bar taste, learning,
and behaviour received their final doom or their
crowning approbation : the drawing-rooms of
Paris reigned supreme. In those drawing-rooms
the President was well thought of ; he had
powerful friends at Court ; was it not to be
expected that at last, in the fullness of time, his
worth would be completely recognized and
receive its due reward in the highest honour
that could fall to a man of his pretensions — a
seat in the Academy ? A prize, indeed, that it
was impossible not to hope for 1 The promises
of other worlds had grown dim and dubious ;
but here, among the glorious forty, was a definite,
an indisputable immortality — and one, more-
over, that possessed the singular advantage of
being enjoyable here and now, while the
eighteenth-century sun still shone on the rue
de la .Prefecture,

The President was at the height of his ex-
uberant manhood— he was not yet fifty— when
something occurred which had a strange and
unexpected effect upon his history. Voltaire,

73 *

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

having quarrelled with Frederick the Great and
shaken the dust of Potsdam from his feet, had
been wandering for some years in uncertainty
among the minor states that lay between France
and Germany. He had settled for a time at
Colmar; hehad moved to Lausanne ; thenhehad
gone to Geneva and taken a country house in its
neighbourhood. But the Calvinism of the towns-
people, who frowned at his passion for private
theatricals, annoyed him ; and his eye fell on the
house and territory of Ferney, which was just
inside the borders of France, but, lying on the
eastern slopes of the Jura mountains, was so
remote as to be almost independent of French
control and within a drive of the free city of
Geneva. This was exactly what he wanted —
a secluded abode, where he would have elbow-
room for his activities, and from which he could
bolt at any moment, if things became too hot
for him. Accordingly, in 1758, he bought
Ferney, where he lived for the rest of his life ;
and at the same time he entered into negotia-
tions for the purchase of a neighbouring pro-
perty — that of Tournay — which belonged to
the President de Brosses. The President, who
already had a slight acquaintance with the great

74

THE PRESIDENT DE BROSSES

man — his wife, a Crevecceur, was the daughter
of one of Voltaire’s oldest friends — declared that
he would be delighted to oblige him. There
was some stiff haggling, for each party prided
himself on his business capacity, but eventually
Voltaire, for 35,000 francs, became possessed of
the domain of Tournay — which included the
right to the title of Count — on a life-tenancy.
The bargain, obviously, was something of a
gamble ; the new Comte de Tournay was sixty-
four, and, so he declared, on the point of death ;
but then he had been on the point of death ever
since any one could remember. When it was
all over, the President had an uneasy feeling
that he had been done. The feeling increased
as time went on, and his agent informed him
that the estate was being allowed to go to rack
and ruin. He complained ; but the poet re-
plied with a flat denial, declared — what was
quite true — that he had built a theatre at
Tournay, and begged the President to come and
see his latest tragedy performed in it, A little
later, a new manoeuvre began : Voltaire pro-
posed that he should buy the property outright.
The President was not altogether averse ; but
this time he was far more cautious ; as the

75

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

negotiations proceeded, he became privately
convinced that an attempt was being made to
cheat him ; but he said nothing, and the pro-
posal lapsed. Voltaire, on his side, was none
too pleased with his bargain. The land of
Tournay was poor, and the Countship had
brought with it various responsibilities and
expenses not at all to his taste. He was vexed ;
and his vexation took the form of bothering the
President, in letter after letter, with a multitude
of legal questions upon points connected with
the property. The President was also vexed ;
but he answered every letter and every question
with extreme civility.

In this way two years passed — two years
during which the President published his Culte
des Dieux Fitiches and Voltaire his Candide. The
old creature at Ferney was at last beginning to
settle down to the final and by far the most
important period of his immense and extra-
ordinary career. Free, rich, happy, with his
colossal reputation and his terrific energy, he
was starting on the great adventure of his life —
his onslaught upon Christianity. Meanwhile
his vitality and his pugnacity were satisfying
themselves in a multitude of minor ways. He

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THE PRESIDENT DE BROSSES

was belabouring Rousseau, torturing Freron,
annihilating le Franc de Pompignan j he was
corresponding with all the world, he was com-
posing half a dozen tragedies, he was writing
the life of Peter the Great, he was preparing a
monumental edition of Corneille. When, in
the midst of these and a hundred other activities,
he received a bill for 281 francs from a peasant
called Chariot Baudy for fourteen loads of wood
from Tournay, he brushed the matter on one
side. More bother from Tournay ! But it was
ridiculous — why should he pay for wood from
his own estate ? And besides, he remembered
quite well that the President, before the sale was
completed, had told him that he could have as
much wood as he wanted. He did nothing, and
when Chariot Baudy pressed for the money,
refused to pay. Then, early in 1761, a letter
arrived from the President. “Agreez, Mon-
sieur,” he began, “ que je vous demande Impli-
cation d’une chose tout-i-fait singuli£re.”
Chariot Baudy, he continued, had, before the sale
of Tournay, bought from the President the cut
wood on the estate ; Baudy had now sent in his
account of what he owed the President, and had
subtracted from it the sum of 281 francs for

77

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

wood supplied to M. de Voltaire ; his reason
for this was that M. de Voltaire had told him
that the wood was a gift from the President.
“ Je vous demande excuse,” the letter went on,
“ si je vous r£p£te un tel propos : car vous
sentez bien que je suis fort ^loigne de croire que
vous l’ayez tenu, et je n’y ajoute pas la moindre
foi. Je ne prends ceci que pour le discours d’un
homme rustique fait pour ignorer les usages du
monde et les convenances ; qui ne sait pas qu’on
envoie bien a son ami et son voisin un panier
de pSches, mais que si on s’avisait de lui faire
la galanterie de quatorze moules de bois, il le
prendrait pour une absurdity contraire aux
biens^ances.” The sarcasm was clear and
cutting, and the President proceeded to give
his own account of what had occurred. He
distinctly remembered, he said, that Voltaire,
at the time of the negotiations about Toumay,
had in the course of conversation, complained
of a lack of firewood, and that he had thereupon
recommended Baudy as the man who would
supply Voltaire with as much as he wanted.
That was all ; the offensive notion of a present
had never entered his head. “ J’esp^re,” he
concluded, “ que vous voudrez bien faire incon-

78

THE PRESIDENT DE BROSSES

tinent payer cette bagatelle k Charlotj parce que,
comme je me ferai certainement payer de lui,
il aurait infailliblement aussi son recours contre
vous ; ce qui ferait une affaire du genre de
celles qu’un homme tel que vous ne veut point
avoir.”

It was obvious to anyone in his senses that
the President was right : that his account of the
matter was the true one, and that, as he had
said, the only reasonable thing for Voltaire to
do was to pay Baudy the money — the miserable
sum of money ! — and finish the business. But
Voltaire was not in his senses — he never was
when even the most miserable sum of money
was concerned. He could not bear to think of
parting with 281 francs. It was monstrous ;
the land and everything on it was his ; the wood
had been given him ; he would not be set
down ; and this wretched man had dared to be
ironical ! At any rate, he had had the wood
and burnt it, and the President de Brasses might
do what he liked. Accordingly, in his next
letter, he airily dismissed the subject. “ It is
no longer a question,” he said, “of Charles
Baudy and four loads of wood ” — and proceeded
to discuss an entirely different matter. The

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

President replied in detail, and then reverted
for a moment to Baudy — “ Four loads — read
fourteen ; you dropped a figure ; we call this a
lapsus linguae ” ; — and he begged Voltaire once
more to avoid the painful publicity of a lawsuit.
Voltaire made no reply ; he hoped the whole
thing was over ; but he was wrong. In June,
the President sued Baudy for 281 francs, and in
July Baudy sued Voltaire for the same sum.
The cases came on at the local court, and were
adjourned.

And now the fury of the frantic old desperado
flamed up sky-high. Seizing his pen, he poured
out, in letter after letter to all the lawyers in
Dijon, his account of what had happened — the
swindling to which he had been subjected — the
insults to which he had been exposed. To a
particular friend, the President de Ruffey, he
sent a long formal statement of his case, followed
by a private sheet of enraged argumentation.
As for his enemy, he was no longer a president —
the little bewigged monster — he was a fetish.
He would see to it that the nickname stuck.
“ Le Fetiche,” he shrieked, “ demande de
l’argcnt de ses moules et de ses fagots. . . . Le
miserable m’accable d’exploits.” He had put

80

THE PRESIDENT DE BROSSES

up Baudy, who was a man of straw, to do his
dirty work. “ Songez qu’il faisait cette inflmie
dans le temps qu’il recevait de moi 47 miile
livres ! . . . Qu’il tremble ! II ne s’agit pas
de le rendre ridicule : il s’agit de le dishonorer.
Cela m’afflige. Mais il payera cher la bassesse
d’un procidi si coupable et si l&che.” Finally
he addressed the Fetish himself in a letter com-
posed in his most magnificent style. “ Vous
n’etes done venu chez moi, Monsieur, vous ne
m’avez offert votre amitie, que pour empoi-
sonner par des procis la fin de ma vie.” In
great detail he went over the whole dispute.
With singular violence, and no less singular
obtuseness, he asserted the hopelessly contradic-
tory propositions, both that the wood was his
own and that the President had given it him ,*
he hinted that his enemy would make use of his
position to pervert the course of justice ; and
he ended with threats. “ S’il faut que M. le
Chancelier, et les Ministres, et tout Paris, soient
instruits de votre proc&ld, ils le seront ; et, s’il
se trouve dans votre Compagnie respectable une
personne qui vous approuve, je me condamne.”

The President’s moment had come — the test-
ing moment of his life. What was he to do ?

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

It was still not too late to withdraw, to pay the
money with a shrug of the shoulders and put an
end to this fearful hubbub and this terrifying
enmity. For a short space, he wavered. It
was true that Voltaire was the greatest writer
of the age, and perhaps he deserved some allow-
ances on that score. In any case, he was an
extremely dangerous antagonist — a man who
had made mincemeat of all his literary opponents
and fought on equal terms with Frederick the
Great. But no ! It was intolerable ! His
Burgundian blood boiled, and the proud tradi-
tions of aristocracy and the judicial habits of
a lifetime asserted themselves. “ IA-dessus on
dit ” : — so he explained later to a friend —
“ e’est un homme dangereux. Et a cause de
ccla, faut-il done le laisser Strc mcchant im-
punement? Ge sont au contraire ces sortes
de gens-la qu’il faut chatier. Je ne le crains
pas. . . . On l’admire, parce qu’il fait d’excel-
lents vers. Sans doute il les fait excellents.
Mais ce sont ses vers qu’il faut admirer.” And
so, taking Voltaire’s letter, he wrote upon the
margin of it a reply, in which he not only
rebutted his arguments but told him exactly
what he thought of him. Point by point he

82

THE PRESIDENT DE BROSSES

exposed the futility of Voltaire’s contentions.
He showed that there was actually a clause in
the lease, by which the cut wood on the estate
was specifically excepted from the sale. He
offered to drop the matter if Voltaire would send
him a receipt in the following terms : “ Je
soussign^, Frangois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire,
chevalier, seigneur de Ferney, gentilhomme
ordinaire de la chambre du Roi, reconnois que
M. de Brosses, president du Parlement, m’a fait
present de . . . voies de bois de moule, pour
mon chauffage, en valeur de 281 f., dont je le
remercie.” He pointed out that otherwise he
had nothing to do with the business, that
Voltaire owed the money to Chariot Baudy, and
that it was indeed extraordinary to see “un
homme si riche et si illustre se tourmenter a tel
exc6s pour ne pas payer a un paysan 280 livres
pour du bois de chauffage qu’il a fourni.” His
incidental remarks were nothing if not out-
spoken. “En verity,” he wrote, “je g&nis
pour l’humanite de voir un si grand g&iie avee
un coeur si petit sans cesse tirailld par des miseres
de jalousie et de tesine. C’est vous-meme qui
empoisonnez une vie si bien faite d’ailleurs pour
etre heureuse.” As for the suggestion that he

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

would bring undue influence to bear upon the
case, — “ il ne convient pas de parler ainsi :
soyez assez sage a l’avenir pour ne rien dire de
pareil k un magistral.” “ Tenez vous pour
dit,” the letter concluded, “ de ne m’ecrire plus
ni sur cette mature ni surtout de ce ton. Je
vous fais, Monsieur, le souhait de Perse : Mens
Sana in corpore sano

It is difficult indeed to imagine the scene at
Ferney while Voltaire was deciphering, on the
edges of his own letter, this devastating reply.
But there was worse to follow. A note came
from the President de Ruffey, in which, with
infinite politeness, he made it clear that in his
opinion Voltaire had no case, and that he had
better pay. At the same time Ruffey wrote
to Madame Denis, Voltaire’s niece, advising
her to give the money privately to Baudy.
Madame Denis had not the courage to do so ;
she showed the letter to her uncle, who, in a
dictated reply, still tried to keep up an appear-
ance of self-confidence. “Je ne crains point
les Fetiches,” he added in his own hand. “ Et
les Fetiches doivent me craindre.” And again,
at the bottom of the paper, he scribbled,
“ N.B. II n’y a qu’une voix sur le Fetiche.”

84

THE PRESIDENT DE BROSSES

But such screams were useless ; the game was
up. The President’s letter remained un-
answered ; Voltaire swallowed in silence the
incredible affront ; and when, a little later, the
President, feeling that he could afford to be
magnanimous, informed a common friend that
he would cancel his account with Baudy if
Voltaire gave 281 francs to the poor of Tournay,
the great man was glad enough to fall in with
the suggestion.

The President had triumphed ; but could he
really have supposed that he would escape from
such an antagonist unscathed? The sequel
came ten years later, when the President
Henault died and left a seat vacant at the
Academy. There was a strong movement in
favour of electing the President de Brosses.
There appeared to be no other very suitable
candidate ; his friends rallied round him ; and
D’Alembert, writing to Voltaire from Paris,
assured him that there was every likelihood that
“ ce plat President ” would be chosen for the
vacant place. The serious feature of the case
was that the old Marechal de Richelieu, who,
after a lifetime of fighting and gallantry, amused
his decrepitude by making his influence felt in

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

affairs of this kind, supported him. What was
to be done ? Voltaire was equal to the occasion :
his letters flew. At all costs the Fetish must be
kept out. He wrote repeatedly to Richelieu,
in that tone of delicate cajolery of which he was
a master, touching upon their ancient friendship,
and spinning a strange tale of the perfidies com-
mitted by “ ce petit pers^cuteur nasilloneur,”
until the Mardchal melted, and promised to
withdraw his support. Finally Voltaire des-
patched to D’Alembert a signed declaration to
the effect that he would himself resign from the
academy if Brosses was elected. This settled
the matter, and no more was heard of the candi-
dature, of the President. It seems likely that
he never knew what it was that had baulked
him of the ambition of his life. For 281 francs
he had lost the immortality of the Academy.
A bad bargain, no doubt ; and yet, after all,
the transaction had gained him another, and
in fact a unique, distinction : he would go
down to history as the man who had got the
better of Voltaire.

86

JAMES BOSWELL

It would be difficult to find a more shattering
refutation of the lessons of cheap morality than
the life of James Boswell. One of the most
extraordinary successes in the history of civiliza-
tion was achieved by an idler, a lecher, a
drunkard, and a snob. Nor was this success
of that sudden explosive kind which is frequent
enough with youthful genius — the inspired
efflorescence of a Rimbaud or a Swinburne ;
it was essentially the product of long years of
accumulated energy ; it was the supreme ex-
pression of an entire life. Boswell triumphed
by dint of abandoning himself, through fifty
years, to his instincts. The example, no doubt,
is not one to be followed rashly. Self-indulgence
is common, and Boswells are rare. The precise
character of the rarity we are now able, for the
first time, to estimate with something like com-
pleteness. Boswell’s nature and inner history
cannot be fully understood from the works

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

published by himself. It is only in his letters
that the whole man is revealed. Professor
Tinker, by collecting together Boswell’s corre-
spondence and editing it with scholarly exacti-
tude, has done a great service to English
literature . 1 There is, in fact, only one fault
to be found with this admirable book. Professor
Tinker shows us more of Boswell than any
previous editor, but he does not show us all
that he might. Like the editors of Walpole’s
Letters and Pepys’s Diary, while giving himself
credit for rehabilitating the text of his author,
he admits in the same breath that he has
mutilated it. When will this silly and barbarous
prudery come to an end ?

Boswell’s career was completely dominated
by his innate characteristics. Where they came
from it is impossible to guess. He was the
strangest sport : the descendant of Scotch
barons and country gentlemen, the son of a
sharp lowland lawyer, was an artist, a spend-
thrift, a buffoon, with a passion for literature,
and without any dignity whatever. So he was

1 “ Letters of James Boswell.” Collected and edited by
Chauncey Brewster Tinker, avols. (Oxford : Clarendon
Press.)

88

JAMES BOSWELL

born, and so he remained ; life taught him
nothing — he had nothing to learn ; his course
was marked out, immutably, from the beginning.
At the age of twenty-three he discovered Dr.
Johnson. A year later he was writing to him,
at Wittenberg, “ from the tomb ofMclancthon”:
“ My paper rests upon the gravestone of that
great and good man. ... At this tomb, then,
my ever dear and respected friend ! I vow to
thee an eternal attachment.” The rest of
Boswell’s existence was the history of that vow’s
accomplishment. But his connection with Dr.
Johnson was itself only the crowning instance of
an overwhelming predisposition, which showed
itself in a multitude of varied forms. There
were other great men, for instance — there was
Mr. Wilkes, and General Paoli, and Sir David
Dalrymple. One of Professor Tinker’s most
delightful discoveries is a series of letters from
the youthful Boswell to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
in which all the writer’s most persistent qualities
— Ills literary skill, his psychological perspi-
cacity, his passion for personalities, and his
amazing aptitude for self-revelation — are ex-
quisitely displayed. “ Dites-moi,” he asked the
misanthropic sentimentalist, “ ne ferai-je bien

89

o

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

de m’appliquer v&ritablement k la musique,
jusques a un certain point? Dites-moi quel
doit etre mon instrument. C’est tard je l’avoue.
Mais n’aurai-je le plaisir de faire un progrfes
continuel, et ne serai-je pas capable d’adoucir
ma vieillesse par les sons de ma lyre ? ” Rousseau
was completely melted. The elder Pitt, how-
ever, was made of sterner stuff. When Boswell
appeared before him in the costume of a Corsi-
can chieftain, “ Lord Chatham,” we are told,
“ smiled, but received him very graciously in
his Pompous manner ” — and there the acquaint-
ance ended ; in spite of Boswell’s modest
suggestion that the Prime Minister should
“honour me now and then with a letter.
... To correspond with a Paoli and with a
Chatham is enough to keep a young man ever
ardent in the pursuit of virtuous fame.”

Fame — though perhaps it was hardly virtu-
ous — Boswell certainly attained ; but his ardent
pursuit of it followed the track of an extra-
ordinary zigzag which could never have had
anything in common with letters from Lord
Chatham. His own letters to his friend Temple
lay bare the whole unique peregrination, from
start to finish. To confess is the desire of many ;

90

JAMES BOSWELL

but it is within the power of few. A rare clarity
of vision, a still rarer candour of expression —
without these qualities it is vain for a man to
seek to unburden his heart. Boswell possessed
them in the highest degree ; and, at the same
time, he was untroubled by certain other
qualities, which, admirable though they be in
other connections, are fatal for this particular
purpose. He had no pride, no shame, and no
dignity. The result was that a multitude of
inhibitions passed him by. Nevertheless he was
by no means detached. His was not the method
of the scientific observer, noting his introspec-
tions with a cold exactness — far from it ; he was
intimately fascinated by everything to do with
himself— his thoughts, his feelings, his reactions ;
and yet he was able to give expression to them
all with absolute ingenuousness, without a shade
of self-consciousness, without a particle of reserve.
Naturally enough the picture presented in such
circumstances is full of absurdities, for no cha-
racter which had suppressed its absurdities could
possibly depict itself so. Boswell was ex hypo-
thesi absurd : it was his absurdity that was the
essential condition of his consummate art.

It was in the description of his love affairs

9i

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

that this truly marvellous capacity found its
fullest scope. The succession of his passions,
with all their details, their variations, their
agitations, and their preposterousnesses, fill the
letters to Temple (a quiet clergyman in the
depths of Devonshire) with a constant efferves-
cence of delight. One progresses with wonder-
ful exhilaration from Miss W 1 ("just such

a young lady as I could wish for the partner of
my soul ”) to Zelide (** upon my soul, Temple,
I must have her ”), and so to the Signora, and
the Moffat woman (" can I do better than keep
a dear infidel for my hours of Paphian bliss ? ”),
and the Princess (“ here every flower is united”),
and the gardener’s daughter, and Mrs. D., and
Miss Bosville, and La Belle Irlandaise (“just
sixteen, formed like a Grecian nymph, with the
sweetest countenance, full of sensibility, accom-
plished, with a Dublin education ”), and
Mrs. Boswell (“ I am fully sensible of my
happiness in being married to so excellent a
woman”), and Miss Silverton (“in the fly
with me, an amiable creature who has been
in France. I can unite little fondnesses with
perfect conjugal love ”), and Miss Bagnal (“ a
Ranelagh girl , but of excellent principles, in so

98

JAMES BOSWELL

much that she reads prayers to the servants in
her father’s family, every Sunday evening.
‘ Let me see such a woman,’ cried I ’’), and
Miss Milles (“ (Tune certaine Age , and with a
fortune of £10,000”), and — but the catalogue
is endless. These are the pages which record
the sunny hours of Boswell’s chequered day.
Light and warmth sparkle from them ; but,
even in the noon of his happiness, there were
sudden clouds. Hypochondria seized him ; he
would wake in the night “ dreading annihila-
tion, or being thrown into some horrible state
of being.” His conscience would not leave him
alone ; he was attacked by disgraceful illnesses ;
he felt “ like a man ordered for ignominious
execution ” ; he feared that his infidelities to
Mrs. Boswell would not be excused hereafter.
And then his vital spirits rushed to his rescue,
and the shadow fled. Was he not the friend
of Paoli ? Indeed he was ; and he was sitting
in a library forty feet long, dressed in green
and gold. The future was radiant. “ My
warm imagination looks forward with great
complacency on the sobriety, the healthfulness,
and the worth of my future life.” As for his
infidelities, were they so reprehensible after

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

all ? “ Concubinage is almost universal. If it
was morally wrong, why was it permitted to the
pious men under the Old Testament? Why
did our Saviour never say a word against it ? '*
As his life went on, however, the clouds grew
thicker and more menacing, and the end was
storm and darkness. The climax came with
the death of his wife. Boswell found himself at
the age of fifty alone in the world with embar-
rassed fortunes, a family of young children to
bring up, and no sign that any of the “ lowering
hopes ” of his youth had been realized. Worse
still, he had become by this time a confirmed
drunkard. His self-reproaches were pitiable ;
his efforts at amendment never ceased ; he
took a vow of sobriety under “ a venerable
yew ” ; he swore a solemn oath that he would
give up drinking altogether — that he would
limit himself to four glasses of wine at dinner
and a pint afterwards ; but it was all in vain.
His way of life grew more and more disorderly,
humiliating, and miserable. If he had retired
to Scotland, and lived economically on his
estate, he might have retrieved his position ;
but that was what he could not do ; he could
not be out of London. His ambitions seemed

94

JAMES BOSWELL

to multiply with his misfortunes. He exchanged
the Scotch bar for the English, and lost all his
professional income at a blow. He had wild
hopes of becoming a Member of Parliament, if
only he toadied Lord Lonsdale sufficiently ;
and Lord Lonsdale promised much, asked him
to his castle, made a butt of him, hid his wig,
was gravely concerned, and finally threw him
off after “ expressing himself in the most de-
grading manner in presence of a low man
from Carlisle and one of his menial servants.”
Consolations now were few indeed. It was
something, no doubt, to be able to go to Court.
“ I was the great man at the late drawing-room
in a suit of imperial blue lined with rose-coloured
silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought
buttons. What a motley scene is life I ” And
at Eton, where he was “ carried to dine at the
Fellows’ table,” it was pleasant enough to find
that in spite of a Scotch education one could
still make a creditable figure. “ I had my
classical quotations very ready.” But these
were fleeting gleams. “ Your kindness to me,”
he burst out to Temple, in April, 1791, “fairly
makes me shed tears. Alas, I fear that my
constitutional melancholy, which returns in such

95

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

dismal fits and is now aggravated by the loss
of my valuable wife, must prevent me from any
permanent felicity in this life. I snatch gratifi-
cations ; but have no comfort , at least very little.
... I get bad rest in the night, and then
I brood over all my complaints — the sickly mind
which I have had from my early years — the
disappointment of my hopes of success in life
— the irrevocable separation between me and
that excellent woman who was my cousin, my
friend, and my wife — the embarrassment of my
affairs — the disadvantage to my children in
having so wretched a father — nay, the want of
absolute certainty of being happy after death, the
sure prospect of which is frightful. No more of
this.”

The tragedy was closing ; but it was only
superficially a sordid one. Six weeks later the
writer of these lines published, in two volumes
quarto, the Life of Dr. Johnson. In reality,
Boswell’s spirit had never failed. With incred-
ible persistence he had carried through the
enormous task which he had set himself thirty
years earlier. Everything else was gone. He
was burnt down to the wick, but his work was
there. It was the work of one whose appetite

96

JAMES BOSWELL

for life was insatiable — so insatiable that it
proved in the end self-destructive. The same
force which produced the Life of Johnson plunged
its author into ruin and desperation. If Boswell
had been capable of retiring to the country and
economizing we should never have heard of him.
It was Lord Lonsdale’s butt who reached
immortality.

97

THE ABBE MORELLET

Talleyrand once remarked that only those
who had lived in France before the Revolution
had really experienced la douceur de vivre. The
Abb6 Morellet would have agreed with him.
Bom in 1727 at Lyons, the son of a small paper
merchant, how was it possible, in that age of
caste and privilege, that Andre Morellet should
have known anything of life but what was hard,
dull, and insignificant? So one might have
supposed ; but the contrary was the case.
Before he was thirty this young man, without
either fortune or connections, and without
taking very much trouble about it, found him-
self a member of the most brilliant society in
Paris, the close friend of die famous and the
great, with a rosy future before him. The
secret of it was simple : he had shown that he
was intelligent ; and in those days a litde
intelligence went a long way. So, indeed, did
a little — a very litde — money. A thousand

98

THE ABBS MORELLET

francs from a generous cousin had opened Paris
to him, by enabling him to go to the Sorbonne,
whence, after five years, he had emerged an
Abbe and an infidel. A chance meeting with
Diderot did the rest. The great philosophe ,
forty years of age and at the height of his
intellectual power, completely captivated a
youth whose eager mind was only waiting for
new ideas and new activities. Every Sunday
morning the Abbe scaled the stairs to Diderot’s
lodging, to sit entranced for hours, while the
Master poured forth the irresistible floods of his
amazing conversation. “J’ai eprouve peu de
plaisirs de 1’ esprit au-dessus de celui-la,” wrote
Morellet long afterwards ; “ et je m’en souvien-
drai toujours.” One can well believe it. The
young man listened so intelligently that Diderot
soon saw he would do ; enrolled him among his
disciples ; introduced him to all his friends ;
and set him to write articles for his great
Encyclopaedia. La douceur de vivre had begun.

Thirty delightful years followed — years of
exciting work, delicious fHendship, and ever-
growing optimism. The great battle for liberty,
tolerance, reason, and humanity was in full
swing ; the forces of darkness were yielding

99

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

more and more rapidly ; and Morellet was in
the forefront of the fight. He wrote with un-
tiring zeal. Besides his Encyclopaedia articles,
he produced pamphlets in favour of the Pro-
testants, he brought out a Manuel des Inquisi-
teurs exposing the methods of the Inquisition,
he translated Beccaria’s great work. But his
principal interest was political economy. A
close friend of Turgot, he was one of the earliest
believers in Free Trade. He translated The
Wealth of Nations ; though the cast of his mind
contrasted curiously with Adam Smith’s. The
Abb6, like most of the philosophes, preferred the
a priori mode of argument. The reasons which
led him to favour Free Trade are character-
istic. The rights of property, he argued, are
fundamental to the very existence of civilized
society ; now to interfere with the freedom of
exchange is to attack one of the rights of pro-
perty ; therefore Protection and civilization are
incompatible. This extremely complete argu-
ment seems to have escaped the notice of Tory
Free Traders.

But the Abb6 was not merely enlightened and
argumentative ; he had another quality which
was essential in those days if one was to make

too

THE ABBfi MORELLET

any figure at all : he was malicious — though
only, of course, at the expense of “ the enemies
of reason.” Some particularly biting little fly-
sheets of his actually brought a word of praise
from the mighty Patriarch of Femey. “ Em-
brasscz pour moi PAbbd Mords-les,” wrote
Voltaire to a common friend; “je ne connais
personne qui soit plus capable de rcndre service
a la raison.” This was a testimonial indeed 1
Morellet’s reputation went up with a bound,
and he himself declared that the sentence was
all he wanted by way of an epitaph.

Only one thing more was needed to make
his success complete ; and that a kindly fate
provided. Palissot, a prottgl of a certain great
lady, the Princesse de Robecq, attacked the
philosophes in a satirical farce. Morellet, among
the rest, replied with a stinging pamphlet ; but
he was unwise enough to direct some of his
sharp remarks, not at Palissot, but at the
Princess. This could not be allowed. Madame
de Robecq had been the mistress of the Due de
Choiseul, who was all-powerful with Madame
de Pompadour and, through her, with the King.
A lettre de cachet sent Morellet to the Bastille.
One can imagine no more striking example of

ioi

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

the corruption and tyranny of the ancien rtgime
— if only the poor Abbe had been treated
properly — thrown into an underground dun-
geon, let us say, loaded with chains, and fed on
bread and water. Unfortunately, nothing of
the sort occurred. The victim was given a
comfortable room, plenty of excellent food, a
bottle of wine a day, provided with writing
materials, and allowed all the books he asked
for, besides being given the run of the Bastille
library, which was especially strong in novels.
He spent three months in peaceful study ; and
returned to liberty with the added glory of
martyrdom.

Liberty and martyrdom — one hardly knew
which was the pleasanter. In Paris one’s morn-
ings passed in reading and writing — the quill
dashing over the paper with a heavenly speed ;
and one’s afternoons and evenings were spent
in company. There were dinners at D’Hol-
bach’s ; there were the nightly gatherings in
the little rooms of Mademoiselle dc Lespinasse ;
there were lunches with Madame Geoffrin ;
and everywhere and always the conversation
was copious and audacious to an intoxicating
degree. Madame Geoffrin, indeed, insisted

102

THE ABBtf MORELLET

upon limits. " Voilk qui cst bien ! ” she used
to exclaim, when the talk grew too wild and
high. Then the more reckless spirits, headed
by D’Alembert, would go out into the Tuileries
Gardens, and, sitting under the trees, continue
the discourse until the exploded ruins of reli-
gions, philosophies, and conventions fell in
showers about their ears. If Paris grew too
hot or too noisy, there was always, close at
hand, Auteuil. There lived Madame Helve-
tius, the widow of one of the leading philosophes,
in a charming little villa, with a garden and
all the simple pleasures of a country life. A
curious manage, highly typical of the nation and
the age, was gathered together between those
friendly walls. Morellet spent every summer
and all his week-ends there ; another clever
Abb£ also had rooms in the house ; and so had
a younger man, Cabanis, to whom Madame
Helv^tius was particularly attached. The ele-
ments of sentiment and friendship were so
perfectly balanced between the four that their
harmony and happiness were complete. Year
after year the summers waxed and waned in
the Auteuil garden, while Morellet lingered
there, with peace, wit, kindness, and beauty

103

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

around him. What was there left to wish for ?
Well 1 it would be nice, he sometimes thought,
to have a little — a very little — more money.
His income — made up of a few small pensions
and legacies — was about £100 a year.

A most pleasant interlude was a visit to
England, where Morellet spent several months
as the guest of Lord Shelburne. Shelburne was
a failure at politics (he was a Prime Minister
and a man of intellect — a hazardous combina-
tion) ; but he made an admirable host. Garrick
and Franklin were asked down to Bowood to
meet the Abb6, and then he was carried off on
a driving tour all over England. One day, near
Plymouth, there was a picnic on the banks of
the Tamar. After the meal, as the company
lay on the grass, and the evening fell, three
country girls made their appearance ; on which
the Abb6, offering them a basket of cherries,
asked them, in his broken English, for a song.
They smiled, and blushed ; but sing they did,
in unison, with the sweetest voices. The de-
scription of the scene inMorellet’s Mimoires reads
like a page from the Vicar of Wakefield.

Even affluence came at last. The incumbent
of a priory, the reversion of which had been

104

THE ABBfi MORELLET

given to Morellet by Turgot twenty years before,
died, and the Abb6 found himself in the posses-
sion of a spacious country house, with land, and
an income of £600 a year. This was in 1788.
In less than a year all was over. The Abb£
never lived in his priory. The tempest of the
Revolution engulfed both him and it. The
rights of property were violated, and the priest
was deprived of a sinecure that he was enjoying
as a member of a Church in which he dis-
believed. Morellet’s surprised indignation at
this catastrophe — his absolute unconsciousness
that the whole effort of his life had been in
reality directed towards this very goal — makes
comic reading — comic, and pathetic too. For
still worse was to follow. The happy minage
at Auteuil was broken up. Cabanis and the
other Abb£ believed in the Revolution ; Madame
Helvetius agreed with them ; and Morellet,
finding himself in a minority of one, after a
violent scene left the villa for ever. His plight
was serious ; but he weathered the storm. A
revolutionary tribunal, before which he was
haled, treated him gently, partly because it
transpired in the course of the proceedings that
he had been a friend of Turgot, “ ce bon citojien

105

H

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

he was dismissed with a caution. Then, besides
saving his own neck, he was able to do a good
turn to the Acadimie Franqaise, of which he was
the Director. When that body was broken up,
the care of its valuable possessions — its papers
and its portraits — fell to him. He concealed
everything in various hiding-places, from which
he drew forth the precious relics in triumph,
when the days of order returned.

For they did return ; and the Abbe, very old
and very tired, found his way, with one or two
others, to young Madame de R&nusat’s draw-
ing-room. There he sat dozing by the fire,
while the talk sped on around him ; dozing,
and nodding ; then suddenly waking up to
denounce Monsieur de Chateaubriand and
lament the ruin of French prose. He was
treated with great respect by everybody ; even
the First Consul was flattering ; even the
Emperor was polite, and made him a Senator.
Then the Emperor vanished, and a Bourbon
ruled once more on the throne of his fathers.
With that tenacity of life which seems to
have been the portion of the creatures of the
eighteenth century, Morellet continued in this
world until his ninety-second year. But this

106

THE ABBE MORELLET

world was no longer what it used to be : some-
thing had gone wrong. Those agitations, those
arrangements and rearrangements, they seemed
hardly worth attending to. One might as well
doze. All his young friends were very kind
certainly, but did they understand ? How
could they? What had been their experience
of life ? As for him, ah ! he had listened to
Diderot — used to sit for hours talking in the
Tuileries Gardens with D’Alembert and Made-
moiselle de Lespinasse — mentioned by Voltaire
— spent half a lifetime at Auteuil with dear
Madame Helvdtius — imprisoned in the Bastille
. . . he nodded. Yes ! He had known la
douceur de viure.

107

MARY BERRY

“ Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona ” :
there could be no better summary of the tragic
romance of Madame du DefFand, Horace Wal-
pole, and Mary Berry. For Love moves in a
mysterious way, and the Paolos and Francescas
of this world, though they may be the most
attractive of his victims, are not the most
remarkable. Madame du Deffand was blind
and nearly seventy when, after a long career of
brilliant dissipation and icy cynicism, she was
suddenly overwhelmed by a passion which com-
pletely dominated her existence, until she died,
fifteen years later, at the age of eighty-three.
Horace Walpole, the object of this extraordinary
adoration, was a middle-aged man of fashion,
a dilettante, whose heart, like hers, had never
felt a violent emotion, and, naturally enough,
was not induced to do so by this strange catas-
trophe. He was flattered, he was charmed ;
but he was obsessed by a terror of ridicule ;

MARY BERRY

his enemies — worse still, his friends — would laugh
if they ever got wind of this romantic aberra-
tion ; and so he mixed kindness and severity,
ruthlessness and attentions, in so fatally medi-
cinal a potion that the unhappy creature in
Paris died at last less of old age than a broken
heart. But “ the whirligig of Time brings in
his revenges.” Walpole himself, when he was
over seventy, suffered the same fate as Madame
du Deffand. The egotism of a lifetime suddenly
collapsed before the fascinations of Mary Berry.
It was in vain that the old wit sought to con-
ceal from himself and the world the nature of
the feelings which had seized upon him. He
made game of his vicissitude ,* he was in love
— ah, yes ! — but with both die charming sisters
— with Agnes as well as Mary ; they were his
“twin wives,” and might share his coronet
between them if they liked. For a short space,
indeed, he was almost entirely happy. Mary
was gentle, intelligent, and appreciative; Agnes,
gay and sprighdy, made a perfect chaperon.
They were his near neighbours at Twickenham,
and night after night they would sit with him
in his Strawberry Hill drawing-room, while,
from his sofa, with an occasional pinch of snuff.

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

he discoursed to them for endless magical hours,
pouring out before them his whole treasury of
anecdotes and reflections and quips and fancies
and memories— old scandals, old frolics, old
absurdities, old characters — the darling sixty
years’ accumulation of the most rapacious gossip
who ever lived.

It was during these happy days — the spring-
time of his passion — that he wrote down for the
sisters his Reminiscences , which have now been
republished, from the original manuscripts, by
the Clarendon Press . 1 The volume, elegantly
printed, with elucidations by Mr. Paget Toyn-
bee, two portraits, and some interesting “ Notes
of conversations with Lady Suffolk,” now pro-
duced for the first time, is as delightful in its
form as in its matter — delightful to handle, to
look at, to browse over for an evening by the
fire. In its polished, delicate pages the English
eighteenth century is reflected for us, as in a
diminishing mirror — St. James’s, Sir Robert, a
King or two, Mrs. Howard, old Sarah, Qjieen

1 “ Reminiscences, written by Mr. Horace Walpole in
1788, for the amusement of Miss Mary and Miss
Agnes Berry.” With Notes and Index by Paget Toynbee
(Oxford : Clarendon Press.)

XIO

MARY BERRY

Caroline — miraculously small and neat ; while
Dance’s admirable drawing shows us the author,
almost, one might imagine, in the act of com-
position, with his face so full of subtlety,
experience, reticence, and sly urbanity.

But the happy days were not to last. Love
grows cruel as he grows old ; the arrow festers
in the flesh ; and a pleasant pang becomes a
torture. Walpole could not be blinded for ever
to the essential impossibility of his situation, and
at last he was obliged to plumb his feelings to
their depths. A dreadful blow fell when the
sisters, accompanied by their father, left England
on the grand tour. Their decision to do so had
stunned him ; their departure plunged him in
grief; he was very old, and they were to be
away for more than a year ; would he ever see
Mary again ? Yet he bore up bravely, and his
inimitable letters flowed over Europe in an
unceasing stream. The crisis came when, on
their return journey, the Berrys arranged to go
back through France. It was in 1791, and the
country was seething with the ferment of the
Revolution. Walpole was terrified, and im-
plored Mary to return by Germany ; in vain.
Then the old man’s self-control utterly gave way.

hi

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

Fear, mortification, anger, and solicitude mas-
tered him by turns ; his agitation was boundless;
he could talk of nothing but the Berrys, rushing
from person to person, pouring out, everywhere,
to anybody, the palpitating tale of his terrors
and his griefs. London shrugged its shoulders :
Lord Orford was ridiculous. The grim ghost
of Madame du Deffand must have smiled
sardonically at the sight.

It was not merely the incompatibility of age
that made his case desperate ; there was
another more fatal circumstance. Mary Berry
herself was passionately in love — with General
O’Hara. He was a middle-aged soldier of an
old-fashioned type, abounding in Irish energy,
with a red and black face and shining teeth ;
and when, in 1795, he was made Governor of
Gibraltar, she became engaged to marry him.
The marriage itself was postponed, at her wish.
She might have left Walpole in his misery ; and
even her father, who was helpless without her ;
but she could not leave her sister, who was in
the middle of a difficult love-affair, and was
every moment in need of her advice. “ I think
I am doing right,” she told O’Hara. “ I am
sure I am consulting the peace and happiness

112

MARY BERRY

of those about me, and not my own.” The
General sailed, and she never saw him again.
At first their correspondence was all that was
most fitting. The General poured out his
gallantries, and Mary indulged in delightful
visions of domesticity. She sketched in detail
the balance-sheet of their future “ establish-
ment.” Reducing their expenditure to a mini-
mum, she came to the conclusion that £2,1263
a year would be enough for them both. Of
this sum, £58 would cover “ the wages of four
women servants — a housekeeper, a cook under
her, a housemaid, and lady’s maid ” ; while
“liveries for the three men servants and the
coachman ” would cost £80 a year, and wine
£100. But Mary’s castle was all too truly in
Spain. Before the year was out, it had van-
ished into thin air. She discovered that the
“ Old Cock of the Rock,” as his military com-
rades called him, was keeping a couple of
mistresses ,• expostulations followed, mutual
anger, and finally a complete severance. She
believed to the end of her life that if they could
have met for twenty-four hours every difficulty
would have disappeared ; but it was not to be.
The French War prevented O’Hara from re-

"3

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

turning to England, and in 1802 he died at
his post.

Mary Berry was to live for half a century
more, but she never recovered from this disaster.
There, for the rest of her life, at the very basis
of her existence, lay the iron fact of an irre-
mediable disappointment. Thus her fate was
the very reverse of Madame du Deffand’s ; the
emotional tragedy, coming at the beginning of a
long life instead of at the end, gave a sombre
colour to the whole ; and yet, in the structure
of their minds, the two were curiously similar.
Both were remarkable for reason and good
sense, for a certain intellectual probity, for a
disillusioned view of things, and for great
strength of will. Between these two stern
women, the figure of Horace Walpole makes
a strange appearance — a creature all vanity,
elegance, insinuation, and finesse — by far the
most feminine of the three.

He died, leaving the sisters a house at Little
Strawberry Hill and the interest on £4,000 for
each of them for their lives. By a cruel irony
of circumstance, her sister’s love-affair, which
had led Mary, so fatally, to postpone her
marriage, turned out no less unfortunately than

114

MARY BERRY

her own. Agnes had become engaged to a
wealthy young cousin ; but, at the last moment,
the match had been broken off. The sisters
never separated for the whole of their long lives.
Agnes was cheerful, but a little vague in the
head ; she painted. Old Mr. Berry was cheer-
ful, but quite incompetent ; he did nothing at
all. Mary was intelligent, with enough char-
acter for three at the very least ; and she did
everything that had to be done, with consum-
mate ease. Friends surrounded her. Walpole
had launched the family into the highest society,
where they had at once become very popular.
His cousin, Mrs. Damer, was Mary’s intimate
and confidante. The Berry sisters — Blackberry
and Gooseberry they were nicknamed by the
malicious — were seen at every social function,
and gradually became a social centre them-
selves. Among her other gifts Mary possessed
a marvellous capacity for the part of hostess.
Wherever she went — and she was constantly on
the move — in North Audley Street, in Bath, in
Paris, in Italy — it always happened that the
most fashionable and the cleverest people
grouped themselves about her. One winter,
in Genoa, she seemed to create a civilization

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

out of nothing ; the little community gave a
gasp of horror when she went away. Apparently
there was nothing that she could not bring
about in her drawing-room : she could even
make Frenchmen hold their tongues ; she could
even make Englishmen talk.

But these were not her only accomplishments.
Her masculine mind exercised itself over higher
things. She read eagerly and long ; she edited
Walpole’s papers ; she studied political econ-
omy, appreciating Malthus and Free Trade.
In Madame de S tael’s opinion she was “ by far
the cleverest woman in England.” She had
literary ambitions, and brought out a book on
“ Social Life in England and France ” ; but
her style failed to express the force of her
mentality, so that her careful sentences are
to-day unreadable. Had she been a man, she
would not have shone as a writer, but as a
political thinker or an administrator ; and a
man she should have been ; with her massive,
practical intelligence, she was born too early
to be a successful woman. She felt this bitterly.
Conscious of high powers, she declaimed against
the miserable estate of women, which prevented
her from using them. She might have been a

MARY BERRY

towering leader, in thought or action ; as it
was, she was insignificant. So she said — “in-
significant ! ” — repeating the word over and
over again. “ And nobody,” she added, “ ever
suffered insignificance more unwillingly than
myself.”

Yet it was a mitigated insignificance, after all.
In 1817 old Mr. Berry died, and for another
thirty years all that was distinguished in England
and in France passed through the sisters’ room
in Curzon Street. As time went on, Mary grew
ever grander and more vigorous. With old age,
something like happiness seemed to come to
her — though it was a happiness without serenity.
Agnes chirped blithely by her side. Mrs. Darner
had vanished, but her place was taken by Lady
Charlotte Lindsay, who remained a faithful
follower till her death. We catch a glimpse of
the three ladies in Paris in 1834, when they
were all in the neighbourhood of seventy.
“ The Berrys,” Lady Granville tells us, “ run
up and down.” Mary was the leader, pre-
potent, scolding, loud-voiced, and dressed in a
pink sash. Agnes and Lady Charlotte fluttered
along behind her. There was some laughter,
but there was more admiration : Miss Berry

*i 1

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

was impossible to resist. Everyone flocked to
her evenings, as usual, and even critical Lady
Granville was at her feet. She was friendly and
true, said the Ambassadress, in spite of her
frowns and hootings, and her departure would
be regretted very much.

The salon in Curzon Street lasted on into the
Victorian age, and Thackeray would talk for
hours with the friend of Horace Walpole. The
lady was indeed a fascinating relic of an
abolished world, as she sat, large and formid-
able, bolt upright, in her black wig, with her
rouged cheeks, her commanding features, and
her loud conversation, garnished with vigorous
oaths. When, in 1852, both sisters died, aged
eighty-nine and eighty-eight, the eighteenth
century finally vanished from the earth. So
much was plain to the habituSs of Curzon Street ;
but they had failed to realize the inner nature,
the tragic under-tones, of that spirit which had
delighted them so wonderfully with its energy
and power. It was only when Mary Berry’s
papers came to be examined that the traces of
her secret history appeared. Among them was
a description of a dream, dreamt when she was
nearly eighty, in which she had found herself

118

MARY BERRY

walking with Mrs. Damer by a Southern shore,
young again, and married to General O’Hara.
She was perfectly happy — so happy that she
prayed to die “ before this beautiful vision of
life fades, as fade it must from my senses.” Yet
no ! — she was about to have a child ; she must
live to give him a child, she told Mrs. Damer,
and then she might die, “ convinced that I have
exhausted everything that can make life desir-
able. . . . Here I awoke with my eyes suffused
with tears, to find myself a poor, feeble old soul,
never having possessed either husband or child,
and having long survived that friend whom my
waking as well as my sleeping thoughts always
recall to me, as the comfort and support of
nearly thirty years of my sadly insignificant
existence.”

”9

MADAME DE LIEVEN

Aristocrats (no doubt) still exist; but they
are shorn beings, for whom the wind is not
tempered — powerless, out of place, and slightly
ridiculous. For about a hundred years it has
been so. The stages in the history of nobility
may be reckoned by the different barricades it
has put up to keep off the common multitude.
The feudal lord used armour to separate him
from the rest of the world ; then, as civilization
grew, it was found that a wig did almost as
well ; and there was a curious transition period
{temp. Marlborough) when armour and wigs
were worn at the same time. After that, armour
vanished, and wigs were left, to rule splendidly
through the eighteenth century, until the French
Revolution. A fearful moment ! Wigs went.
Nevertheless the citadel still held out, for another
barrier remained — the barrier of manners ; and
for a generation it was just possible to be an
aristocrat on manners alone. Then, at last,

iao

MADAME DE LIEVEN

about 1830, manners themselves crumbled,
undermined by the insidious permeation of a
new — a middle-class — behaviour ; and all was
over. Madame de Lieven was one of the
supreme examples of the final period. Her
manners were of the genuinely terrific kind. Sur-
rounded by them, isolated as with an antiseptic
spray, she swept on triumphantly, to survive
untouched — so it seemed — amid an atmosphere
alive with the microbes of bourgeois disintegra-
tion. So it seemed — for in fact something
strange eventually happened. In her case,
aristocracy, like some viscous fluid flowing
along, when it came to the precipice did not
plunge over the edge, but — such was its strength,
its inherent force of concentration — moved, as
it had always moved, straight onward, until it
stuck out, an amazing semi-solid projection,
over the abyss. Only at long last was there a
melting ; the laws of nature asserted them-
selves ; and the inevitable, the deplorable,
collapse ensued.

Bom in 1785, a Russian and a Benckendorf,
Madame de Lieven was by blood more than
half German, for her mother had come from
Wilrtemberg and her father’s family was of

121 1

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

Prussian origin. From the first moment of
her existence she was in the highest sphere.
Her mother had been the favourite companion
of the Empress Marie, wife of Paul I, and on her
death the Empress had adopted the young
Benckendorfs and brought them up under her
own care. At the age of fifteen, Dorothea was
taken from a convent and married to the young
Count de Licven (or, more correctly, Count
Lieven without the “ particule ” ; but it would
be pedantry to insist upon an accuracy unknown
to contemporaries) whose family was no less
closely connected with the Imperial house.
His mother had been the governess of the
Emperor Paul’s children ; when her task was
over, she had retained the highest favour ; and
her son, at the age of twenty-eight, was aide-
de-camp to the Emperor and Secretary for War.
Paul I was murdered ; but under the new Czar
the family fortunes continued to prosper — the
only change being the transference of the Count
de Lieven from the army to the diplomatic
service. In 1809 he was appointed Russian
ambassador at Berlin ; and in 1812 he was
moved to London, where he and his wife were
to remain for the next twenty-two years.

122

MADAME DE LIEVEN

The great world in those days was small —
particularly the English one, which had been
kept in a vacuum for years by the Napoleonic
War. In 1812 a foreign embassy was a sur-
prising novelty in London, and the arrival of
the Lievens produced an excitement which
turned to rapture when it was discovered that
the ambassadress was endowed with social
talents of the highest order. She immediately
became the fashion — and remained so for the
rest of her life. That she possessed neither
beauty nor intellect was probably a positive
advantage ; she was attractive and clever—
that was enough. Her long gawky figure and
her too pronounced features were somehow
fascinating, and her accomplishments were
exactly suited to her milieu ; while she hated
reading, never opening a book except Madame
de S6vigne’s letters, she could be very enter-
taining in four languages, and, if asked, could
play on the pianoforte extremely well. When-
ever she appeared, life was enhanced and inten-
sified. She became the intimate friend of
several great hostesses — Lady Holland, Lady
Gowper, Lady Granville ; she was success-
fully adored by several men of fashion — Lord

123

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

Willoughby, Lord Gower, and (for a short time
— so it was whispered) the Prince Regent him-
self. She was made a patroness of Almack’s —
the only foreign lady to receive the distinction.
Exclusive, vigorous, tart, she went on her way
rejoicing — and then there was a fresh develop-
ment. The war over, the era of conferences
opened. In 1818, at Aix-la-Chapelle, where all
the ministers and diplomats of Europe were
gathered together, she met Metternich, then at
the beginning of his long career as the virtual
ruler of Austria, and a new and serious love-
affair immediately began. It lasted during the
four years that elapsed between the Congress of
Aix-la-Chapelle and that of Verona ; and in
Metternich’s love-letters — extremely long and
extremely metaphysical — the earlier stages of it
may still be traced. The affair ended as sud-
denly as it had started. But this close relation-
ship with the dominating figure in European
politics had a profound effect on Madame de
Lieven’s life.

Henceforward, high diplomacy was to be her
passion. She was nearly forty ; it was time to
be ambitious, to live by the head rather than
the heart, to explore the mysteries of chanceries,

184

MADAME DE LIEVEN

to pull the strings of cabinets, to determine the
fate of nations ; she set to work with a will.
Besides her native wits, she had two great assets
— her position in English society, and the fact
that her husband was a nonentity— she found
that she could simply step into his place. Her
first triumph came when the Czar Alexander
entrusted her personally with an overture to
Canning on the thorny question of Greece.
Alexander’s death and the accession of Nicholas
was all to the good : her husband’s mother
received a princedom, and she herself in con-
sequence became a Princess. At the same time
Russia, abandoning the traditions of the Holy
Alliance, drew nearer to England and the liberal
policy of Canning. Madame de Lieven became
the presiding genius of the new orientation ;
it was possibly owing to her influence with
George IV that Canning obtained the Premier-
ship ; and it was certainly owing to her efforts
that the Treaty of London was signed in 1827,
by which the independence of Greece became
an accomplished fact. After Canning’s death,
she formed a new connection — with Lord Grey.
The great Whig Earl became one of the most
ardent of her admirers. Sitting up in bed every

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morning, he made it his first task to compose
an elaborate epistle to his Egeria, which, when
it was completed, he carefully perfumed with
musk. The precise nature of their relationship
has never transpired. The tone of their corre-
spondence seems to indicate a purely platonic
attachment ; but tones are deceitful, and Lord
Grey was a man of many gallantries ; however,
he was sixty-eight. It is also doubtful who
benefited most by the connection : possibly the
lady’s influence was less than she supposed. At
any rate it is certain that when, on one occasion,
she threatened a withdrawal of her favours
unless the Prime Minister adopted a particular
course, she was met with a regretful, an infinitely
regretful, refusal ; upon which she tactfully
collapsed. But, on another occasion, it seems
possible that her advice produced an important
consequence. When Lord Grey took office,
who was to be Foreign Minister ? Lady Gowper
was Madame de Lieven’s great friend, and
Palmerston was Lady Cowper’s lover. At their
request, Madame de Lieven pressed the claims
of Palmerston upon the Premier, and Palmerston
was appointed. If this was indeed the result of
her solicitations, the triumphant Princess was

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MADAME DE LIEVEN

to find before long that she had got more than
she had bargained for.

In the meantime, all went swimmingly. There
was always some intriguing concoction on the
European table — a revolution in Portugal — the
affairs of Belgium to be settled — a sovereign to
be found for Greece — and Madame de Lieven’s
finger was invariably in the pie. So we see her,
in the Memoirs and Letters of the time, gliding
along in brilliant activity, a radiating focus of
enjoyment, except — ah ! it was her one horror !
— when she found herself with a bore. If it was
her highest felicity to extract, in an excited
Ute-h-tite, the latest piece of diplomatic gossip
from a Cabinet Minister, her deepest agony was
to be forced to mark time with undistinguished
underlings, or — worst of all ! — some literary
person. On such occasions she could not con-
ceal her despair — indeed she hardly wished to —
even from the most eminent — even from the
great CMteaubriand himself. “ Quand elle se
trouve avec des gens de m6rite,” he acidly
noted, “ sa sterility se tait ; elle rev&t sa nullite
d’un air superieur d’ennui, comme si elle avait
le droit d’etre ennuy^e.” She only admitted
one exception : for royal personages very great

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allowances might be made. A royal bore,
indeed, was almost a contradiction in terms;
such a flavour of mysterious suavity hovered for
ever round those enchanted beings. She was
always at her best with them, and for her own
particular royalties — for the Czar and the whole
imperial family — no considerations, no exertions,
no adulations could be too great. She corre-
sponded personally with her imperial master
upon every twist and turn of the international
situation, and yet there were tedious wretches
. . . she would not bear it, she would be ruth-
less, they should be icrasis — and she lifted her
black eyebrows till they almost vanished and
drew herself up to her thinnest height. She
looked like some strange animal — what was it ?
Somebody said that Madame Appony, another
slender, tall ambassadress, was like a giraffe,
and that she and Madame de Lieven were of the
same species. “ Mais non ! ” said Madame
Alfred de Noailles, “ ce n’est pas la meme
classe : Tune mangera l’autre et n’aura qu’un
mauvais repas ” — “ One sees Lieven,” was Lady
Granville’s comment, “ crunching the meek
Appony’s bones.” Everyone was a little afraid
of her — everyone, that is to say, except Lady

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MADAME DE LIEVEN

Holland ; for “ Old Madagascar ” knew no
fear. One day, at a party, having upset her
work-basket, she calmly turned to the ambas-
sadress with, “ Pick it up, my dear, pick it up ! ”
And Madame de Licven went down on her knees
and obeyed. “ Such a sight was never seen
before,” said Lady Granville.

Lady Holland — yes ; but there was also
somebody else ; there was Palmerston. Madame
de Lieven, having (so she was convinced) got
him his appointment as Foreign Secretary,
believed that she could manage him ; he was,
she declared, “ un tres-petit esprit ” ; the
mistake was gross, and it was fatal. In 1834,
Palmerston appointed Stratford Canning ambas-
sador to Russia ; but the Emperor disliked him,
and let it be known, through Madame de
Lieven, that he was unwilling to receive him.
Palmerston, however, persisted in his choice,
in spite of all the arguments of the ambassadress,
who lost her temper, appealed to Lord Grey —
in vain, and then — also in vain — tried to get up
an agitation in the Cabinet. Finally, she advised
the Czar to stand firm, for Palmerston, she said,
would give way when it came to the point.
Accordingly, it was officially stated that Stratford

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Canning would not be received in Russia. The
result, however, was far from Madame de
Lieven’s expectations. Palmerston had had
enough of female interferences, and he decided
to take this opportunity of putting an end to
them altogether. He appointed no ambassador,
and for months the English business in St.
Petersburg was transacted by a chargi d’affaires.
Then there happened precisely what the wily
minister had foreseen. The Emperor could
support the indignity no longer ; he determined
to retort in kind ; and he recalled the Lievens.

So ended the official life of the Princess. The
blow was severe — the pain of parting was
terrible — but, as it turned out, this was only the
beginning of misfortune. In the following year,
her two youngest sons died of scarlet fever ; her
own health was broken ; stricken down by grief
and illness, she gave up the Court appointment
with which her services had been rewarded, and
went to live in Paris. Suddenly she received a
peremptory order of recall. Nicholas, with
autocratic caprice, had flown into a fury ; the
Princess must return I Her husband, seeing
that a chance of self-assertion had at last come
to him, fell in with the Emperor’s wishes. A

MADAME DE LIEVEN

third son died ; and the Prince was forbidden
to communicate the fact to his wife ; she only
learnt it, months later, when one of her letters
to her son was returned to her, with the word
“ mort ” on the envelope. After that, there
was a hectic correspondence, the Prince at one
moment actually threatening to cut off his wife’s
supplies if she remained in Paris. She would
not budge, however, and eventually the storm
blew over ; but the whole system of Madame
de Lieven’s existence had received a terrible
shock. “ Quel pays 1 ” she exclaimed in her
anguish. “ Quel maltre ! Quel p£re ! ”

The instinct which had kept her in Paris was
a sound one ; for there, in that friendly soil,
she was able to strike fresh roots and to create
for herself an establishment that was almost a
home. Her irrepressible social activities once
more triumphed. Installed in Talleyrand’s old
house at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli and
the Rue St. Florentin, with an outlook over the
Place de la Concorde, she held her nightly salon,
and, for another twenty years, revived the glories
of her London reign. Though no longer in any
official situation, she was still perpetually
occupied with the highest politics, was still the

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

terror of embassies, still the delight of the worldly
and the great. Still, in her pitiless exclusiveness,
she would icraser from time to time some wretched
creature from another sphere. “ Monsieur, je
ne vous connais pas/’ she said in icy tones to a
gentleman who presented himself one evening
in her salon. He reminded her of how often
they had met at Ems, in the summer — had taken
the waters together — surely she must remember
him. “ Non, Monsieur,” was the adamantine
reply, and the poor man slunk away, having
learnt the lesson that friendship at Ems and
friendship in Paris are two very different things.

Such was the appearance ; but in fact some-
thing strange had happened : Madame de
Lieven’s aristocracy was trembling over the
abyss. The crash came on June 24, 1837—
the date is significant : it was four days after the
accession of Queen Victoria — when, worn out
by domestic grief, disillusioned, embittered,
unable to resist any longer the permeations of
the Time Spirit, the Princess fell into the arms of
Monsieur Guizot. Fate had achieved an almost
exaggerated irony. For Guizot wa3 the living
epitome of all that was most middle-class.
Infinitely respectable, a Protestant, the father

MADAME DE LIEVEN

of a family, having buried two wives, a learned
historian, he had just given up the portfolio of
public instruction, and was clearly destined to
be the leading spirit of the bourgeois monarchy
of Louis-Philippe. He was fifty years old. His
first wife had been a child of the ancien regime,
but he had tamed her, turned her thoughts
towards duty and domesticity, induced her to
write improving stories for the young, until at
last, suddenly feeling that she could bear it no
longer, she had taken refuge in death while he
was reading aloud to her a sermon by Bossuet
on the immortality of the soul. His second wife
— the niece of the first — had needed no such
pressure ; naturally all that could be wished,
she wrote several volumes of improving stories
for the young quite of her own accord, while
reflections upon the beneficence of the Creator
flowed from her at the slightest provocation ;
but she too had died ; his eldest son had died ;
and the bereaved Guizot was left alone with his
high-mindedness. Madame de Lieven was
fifty-two. It seemed an incredible love-affair —
so much so that Charles Greville, who had
known her intimately all his life, refused to
believe that it was anything but a " social and

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political ” liaison. But the wits of Paris thought
otherwise. It was noticed that Guizot was
always to be found in the house in the Rue St.
Florentin. The malicious Merim^e told the
story of how, after a party at the Princess’s, he
had been the last to leave — except Guizot ; how,
having forgotten something, he had returned to
the drawing-room, and found that the Minister
had already taken off the ribbon (the “ grand
cordon ”) of the Legion of Honour. A chuckle
— a chuckle from beyond the tomb — reached
the world from Chateaubriand. " Le ridicule
attendait k Paris Madame de Lieven. Un doc-
trinaire grave est tomb6 aux pieds d’Omphale :
' Amour, tu perdis Troie.’ ” And the wits of
Paris were right. The liaison, certainly, was
strengthened by political and social interests,
but its basis was sentimental passion. The
testimony of a long series of letters puts that
beyond a doubt. In this peculiar correspond-
ence, pedantry, adoration, platitudes, and
suburban minauderies form a compound for which
one hardly knows whether smiles or tears are
the appropriate reaction. When Guizot begins
a love-letter with — “ Le Cardinal de Retz dit
quelque part,” one can only be delighted, but

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MADAME DE LIEVEN

when Madame dc Lieven exclaims, “ Ah ! que
j’aurais besoin d’etre gouvern^e ! Pourquoi ne
me gouvernez-vous pas ? ” one is positively
embarrassed. One feels that one is committing
an unpardonable — a deliciously unpardonable
— indiscretion, as one overhears the cooings of
these antiquated doves. “ Si vous pouviez
voir,” he says, with exquisite originality, “ tout
ce qu’il y a dans mon coeur, si profond, si fort,
si eternel, si tendre, si triste.” And she answers,
“ Maintenant, je voudrais la tranquillity, la paix
du cottage, votre amour, lc mien, rien que cela.
Ah ! mon ami, c’est 14 le vrai bonheur.” La
paix du cottage ! Can this be really and truly
Madame de Lieven ?

Yet there was a point at which she did draw
the line. After the death of the Prince in 1839,
it was inevitable that there should be a suggestion
of marriage. But it faded away. They were
never united by any other vows than those
which they had sworn to each other in the sight
of heaven. It was rumoured that the difficulty
was simply one of nomenclature. Guizot (one
would expect it) judged that he would be
humiliated if his wife’s name were not his own ;
and the Princess, though wishing to be governed,

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

recoiled at that. “ Ma chere, on dit que vous
allez £pouser Guizot,” said a friend. “ Est-ce
vrai ? ” “ Oh ! ma chere,” was the reply, “ me
voyez-vous annoncee Madame Guizot ! ” Was
this the last resistance of the aristocrat? Or
was it perhaps, in reality, the final proof that
Madame de Lieven was an aristocrat no longer ?

The idyll only ended with death — though
there were a few interruptions. In 1848, revo-
lution forced the lovers to fly to England ; it
also precipitated the aged Metternich, with a
new young wife, upon these hospitable shores.
The quartet spent a fortnight together at
Brighton ; until their discreet conversations were
ended for ever by the restoration of order ;
and the salon in the Rue St. Florentin was opened
again. But a new dispensation was beginning,
in which there was no place for the old minister
of Louis-Philippe. Guizot stood aside ; and,
though Madame de Lieven continued to wield
an influence under the Second Empire, it was
a gradually declining one. The Crimean War
came as a shattering blow. She had made it
up with the Czar ; their correspondence was
once more in full swing ; this was known, and,
when war came, she was forced to leave Paris

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MADAME DE LIEVEN

for Brussels. Her misery was complete, but it
only lasted for eighteen months. She crept back
on the plea of health, and Napoleon, leniendy
winking at her presence, allowed her to remain
— allowed her at last to re-open, very gingerly,
her salon. But everything now was disappearing,
disintegrating, shimmering away. She was in
her seventy-second year ; she was ill and utterly
exhausted ; she was dying. Guizot, a veteran
too, was perpetually at her bedside ; she
begged him at last to leave her — to go into the
next room for a litde. He obeyed, and she
was dead when he returned to her. She had
left a note for him, scribbled in pencil — “Je
vous remercie des vingt annees d’affection et de
bonheur. Ne m’oubliez pas. Adieu, Adieu.”
At the last moment, with those simple and
touching words, the old grandeur — the original
essence that was Dorothea Benckendorf— had
come into its own again.

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K

SIX ENGLISH HISTORIANS

HUME

In what resides the most characteristic virtue of
humanity ? In good works ? Possibly. In the
creation of beautiful objects ? Perhaps. But
some would look in a different direction, and
find it in detachment. To all such David Hume
must be a great saint in the calendar ; for no
mortal being was ever more completely divested
of the trammels of the personal and the par-
ticular, none ever practised with a more con-
summate success the divine art of impartiality.
And certainly to have no axe to grind is some-
thing very noble and very rare. It may be said
to be the antithesis of the bestial. A series of
creatures might be constructed, arranged accord-
ing to their diminishing interest in the immediate
environment, which would begin with the
amoeba and end with the mathematician. In
pure mathematics the maximum of detachment
appears to be reached : the mind moves in an
infinitely complicated pattern, which is abso-

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lutely free from temporal considerations. Yet
this very freedom — the essential condition of the
mathematician’s activity — perhaps gives him an
unfair advantage. He can only be wrong — he
cannot cheat. But the metaphysician can. The
problems with which he deals are of overwhelm-
ing importance to himself and the rest of
humanity ; and it is his business to treat them
with an exactitude as unbiased as if they were
some puzzle in the theory of numbers. That is
his business — and his glory. In the mind of a
Hume one can watch at one’s ease this super-
human balance of contrasting opposites — the
questions of so profound a moment, the answers
of so supreme a calm. And the same beautiful
quality may be traced in the current of his life,
in which the wisdom of philosophy so trium-
phantly interpenetrated the vicissitudes of the
mortal lot.

His history falls into three stages — youth,
maturity, repose. The first was the most
important. Had Hume died at the age of
twenty-six his real work in the world would
have been done, and his fame irrevocably
established. Born in 1711, the younger son of a
small Scottish landowner, he was very early

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HUME

dominated by that passion for literary pursuits
which never left him for the rest of his life.
When he was twenty-two one of those crises
occurred — both physical and mental — which not
uncommonly attack young men of genius when
their adolescence is over, and determine the
lines of their destiny. Hume was suddenly
overcome by restlessness, ill-health, anxiety and
hesitation. He left home, went to London, and
then to Bristol, where, with the idea of making
an independent fortune, he became a clerk in a
merchant’s office. “ But,” as he wrote long
afterwards in his autobiography, “ in a few
months I found that scene totally unsuitable to
me.” No wonder ; and then it was that, by a
bold stroke of instinctive wisdom, he took the
strange step which was the starting-point of his
career. He went to France, where he remained
for three years — first at Rheims, then at La
Fleche, in Anjou — entirely alone, with only just
money enough to support an extremely frugal
existence, and with only the vaguest prospects
before him. During those years he composed his
Treatise of Human Nature, the masterpiece which
contains all that is most important in his
thought. The book opened a new era in

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philosophy. The last vestiges of theological
prepossessions — which were still faintly visible in
Descartes and Locke — were discarded ; and
reason, in all her strength and all her purity,
came into her own. It is in the sense that Hume
gives one of being committed absolutely to
reason — of following wherever reason leads,
with a complete, and even reckless, confidence —
that the great charm of his writing consists.
But it is not only that : one is not alone ; one
is in the company of a supremely competent
guide. With astonishing vigour, with heavenly
lucidity, Hume leads one through the confusion
and the darkness of speculation. One has got
into an aeroplane, which has glided imper-
ceptibly from the ground j with thrilling ease
one mounts and mounts ; and, supported by the
mighty power of intellect, one looks out, to see
the world below one, as one has never seen it
before. In the Treatise there is something that
does not appear again in Hume’s work — a
feeling of excitement — the excitement of dis-
covery. At moments he even hesitates, and
stands back, amazed at his own temerity. “ The
intense view of these manifold contradictions and
imperfections in human reason has so wrought

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HUME

upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready
to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look
upon no opinion even as more probable or
likely than another. Where am I, or what ?
From what causes do I derive my existence, and
to what condition shall I return ? Whose
favour shall I court, and whose anger must I
dread? What beings surround me? and on
whom have I any influence, or who have
influence on me? I am confounded with all
these questions, and begin to fancy myself in
the most deplorable condition imaginable,
environed with the deepest darkness, and
utterly deprived of the use of every member
and faculty.” And then his courage returns once
more, and he speeds along on Iris exploration.

The Treatise, published in 1738, was a com-
plete failure. For many years more Hume
remained in poverty and insignificance. He
eked out a living by precarious secretaryships,
writing meanwhile a series of essays on philo-
sophical, political and aesthetic subjects, which
appeared from time to time in small volumes,
and gradually brought him a certain reputation.
It was not till he was over forty, when he was
made librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

Edinburgh, that his position became secure.
The appointment gave him not only a small
competence, but the command of a large
library ; and he determined to write the history
of England — a task which occupied him for the
next ten years.

The History was a great success ; many
editions were printed ; and in his own day it
was chiefly as a historian that Hume was known
to the general public. After his death his work
continued for many years the standard history
of England, until, with a new age, new fields of
knowledge were opened up and a new style of
historical writing became fashionable. The
book is highly typical of the eighteenth century.
It was an attempt — one of the very earliest — to
apply intelligence to the events of the past.
Hitherto, with very few exceptions (Bacon’s
Henry the Seventh was one of them) history had
been in the hands of memoir writers like Corn-
mines and Clarendon, or moralists like Bossuet.
Montesquieu, in his Considerations sur les Romains,
had been the first to break the new ground ; but
his book, brilliant and weighty as it was, must
be classed rather as a philosophical survey than
a historical narration. Voltaire, almost exactly

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HUME

contemporary with Hume, was indeed a master
of narrative, but was usually too much occupied
with discrediting Christianity to be a satisfactory
historian. Hume had no such arriire pensee ; he
only wished to tell the truth as he saw it, with
clarity and elegance. And he succeeded. In his
volumes — especially those on the Tudors and
Stuarts — one may still find entertainment and
even instruction. Hume was an extremely
intelligent man. and anything that he had to say
on English history could not fail to be worth
attending to. But, unfortunately, mere intelli-
gence is not itself quite enough to make a great
historian. It was not simply that Hume’s
knowledge of his subject was insufficient— that
an enormous number of facts, which have come
into view since he wrote, have made so many of
his statements untrue and so many of his
comments unmeaning ; all that is serious, but it
is not more serious than the circumstance that
his cast of mind was in reality ill-fitted for the
task he had undertaken. The virtues of a meta-
physician are the vices of a historian. A
generalised, colourless, unimaginative view of
thin gs is admirable when one is considering the
law of causality, but one needs something else if
one has to describe Queen Elizabeth.

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This fundamental weakness is materialised in
the style of the History. Nothing could be more
enchanting than Hume’s style when he is dis-
cussing philosophical subjects. The grace and
clarity of exquisite writing are enhanced by a
touch of colloquialism — the tone of a polished
conversation. A personality — a most engaging
personality— just appears. The cat-like touches
of ironic malice — hints of something very sharp
behind the velvet — add to the effect. “ Noth-
ing,” Hume concludes, after demolishing every
argument in favour of the immortality of the
soul, “ could set in a fuller light the infinite
obligations which mankind have to divine
revelation, since we find that no other medium
could ascertain this great and important truth.”
The sentence is characteristic of Hume’s writing
at its best, where the pungency of the sense varies
in direct proportion with the mildness of the
expression. But such effects are banished from
the History. A certain formality, which Hume
doubtless supposed was required by the dignity
of the subject, is interposed between the reader
and the author ; an almost completely latinised
vocabulary makes vividness impossible ; and a
habit of oratio obliqua has a deadening effect. We
shall never know exactly what Henry the Second

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HUME

said — in some uncouth dialect of French or
English — in his final exasperation against Thomas
of Canterbury ; but it was certainly something
about “ a set of fools and cowards,” and
“ vengeance,” and “ an upstart clerk.” Hume,
however, preferred to describe the scene as
follows : “ The King himself being vehemently
agitated, burst forth with an exclamation
against his servants, whose want of zeal, he said,
had so long left him exposed to the enterprises
of that ungrateful and imperious prelate.” Such
phrasing, in conjunction with the Middle Ages,
is comic. The more modern centuries seem to
provide a more appropriate field for urbanity,
aloofness and commonsense. The measured
cynicism of Hume’s comments on Cromwell, for
instance, still makes good reading— particularly
as a corrective to the 0, altitudo ! sentimentalities
of Carlyle.

Soon after his completion of the History Hume
went to Paris as the secretary to the English
Ambassador. He was now a celebrity, and
French society fell upon him with delirious
delight. He was flattered by princes, worshipped
by fine ladies, and treated as an oracle by the
philosopkes. To such an extent did he become the

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Fashion that it was at last positively de rigueur to
have met him, and a lady who, it was discovered,
had not even seen the great philosopher, was
banished from Court. His appearance, so
strangely out of keeping with mental agility,
added to the fascination. “ His face,” wrote
one of his friends, “ was broad and flat, his
mouth wide, and without any other expression
than that of imbecility. His eyes vacant and
spiritless, and the corpulence of his whole person
was far better fitted to communicate the idea of
a turtle-eating alderman than of a refined
philosopher.” All this was indeed delightful to
the French. They loved to watch the awkward
affability of the uncouth figure, to listen in rapt
attention to the extraordinary French accent,
and when, one evening, at a party, the adorable
man appeared in a charade as a sultan between
two lovely ladies and could only say, as he struck
his chest, over and over again, “ Eh bien,
mesdemoiselles, eh bien, vous voilk done 1 ”
their ecstasy reached its height. It seemed
indeed almost impossible to believe in this
combination of the outer and inner man. Even
his own mother never got below the surface.
“ Our Davie,” she is reported to have said, “ is

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HUME

a fine good-natured cratur, but uncommon
wake-minded.” In no sense whatever was this
true. Hume was not only brilliant as an
abstract thinker and a writer ; he was no less
competent in the practical affairs of life. In the
absence of the Ambassador he was left in Paris
for some months as chargi d'affaires, and his
dispatches still exist to show that he understood
diplomacy as well as ratiocination.

Entirely unmoved by the raptures of Paris,
Hume returned to Edinburgh, at last a pros-
perous and wealthy man. For seven years he
lived in his native capital, growing comfortably
old amid leisure, books, and devoted friends. It
is to this final period of his life that those pleasant
legends belong which reveal the genial charm,
the happy temperament, of the philosopher.
There is the story of the tallow-chandler’s wife,
who arrived to deliver a monitory message from
on High, but was diverted from her purpose by
a tactful order for an enormous number of
candles. There is the well-known tale of the
weighty philosopher getting stuck in the boggy
ground at the base of the Castle rock, and
calling on a passing old woman to help him out.
She doubted whether any help should be given

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

to the author of the Essay on Miracles. “ But,
my good woman, does not your religion as a
Christian teach you to do good, even to your
enemies ? '* “ That may be,” was the reply,

“ but ye shallna get out of that till ye become a
Christian yersell : and repeat the Lord’s Prayer
and the Belief” — a feat that was accomplished
with astonishing alacrity. And there is the vision
of the mountainous metaphysician seated, amid
a laughing party of young ladies, on a chair
that was too weak for him, and suddenly
subsiding to the ground.

In 1 776, when Hume was sixty-five, an internal
complaint, to which he had long been subject,
completely undermined his health, and recovery
became impossible. For many months he knew
he was dying, but his mode of life remained
unaltered, and, while he gradually grew weaker,
his cheerfulness continued unabated. With ease,
with gaiety, with the simplicity of perfect taste,
he gently welcomed the inevitable. This
wonderful equanimity lasted till the very end.
There was no ostentation of stoicism, much less
any Addisonian dotting of death-bed i’s. Not
long before he died he amused himself by writing
his autobiography — a model of pointed brevity.

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In one of his last conversations — it was with
Adam Smith — he composed an imaginary con-
versation between himself and Charon, after the
manner of Lucian : “ ‘ Have a little patience,
good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open
the eyes of the Public. If I live a few years
longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the
downfall of some of the prevailing systems of
superstition.’ But Charon would then lose all
temper and decency. * You loitering rogue, that
will not happen these many hundred years. Do
you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a
term ? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy,
loitering rogue.’ ” Within a few days of bis
death he wrote a brief letter to his old friend,
the Comtesse de Boufflers ; it was the final
expression of a supreme detachment. “ My
disorder,” he said, “ is a diarrhoea, or disorder
in my bowels, which has been gradually under-
mining me these two years ; but, within these
six months, has been visibly hastening me to
my end. I see death approach gradually, with-
out anxiety or regret. I salute you, with great
affection and regard, for the last time.”

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GIBBON

Happiness is the word that immediately rises to
the mind at the thought of Edward Gibbon :
and happiness in its widest connotation — in-
cluding good fortune as well as enjoyment.
Good fortune, indeed, followed him from the
cradle to the grave in the most tactful way
possible ; occasionally it appeared to fail him ;
but its absence always turned out to be a blessing
in disguise. Out of a family of seven he alone
had the luck to survive — but only with difficulty ;
and the maladies of his childhood opened his
mind to the pleasures of study and literature.
His mother died ; but her place was taken by a
devoted aunt, whose care brought him through
the dangerous years of adolescence to a vigorous
manhood. His misadventures at Oxford saved
him from becoming a don. His exile to
Lausanne, by giving him a command of the
French language, initiated him into European
culture, and at the same time enabled him to

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GIBBON

lay the foundations of his scholarship. His
father married again ; but his stepmother
remained childless and became one of his
dearest friends. He fell in love ; the match was
forbidden ; and he escaped the dubious joys of
domestic life with the future Madame Necker.
While he was allowed to travel on the Continent,
it seemed doubtful for some time whether his
father would have the resources or the generosity
to send him over the Alps into Italy. His fate
hung in the balance ; but at last his father pro-
duced the necessary five hundred pounds and,
in the autumn of 1 764, Rome saw her historian.
His father died at exactly the right moment, and
left him exactly the right amount of money. At
the age of thirty-three Gibbon found himself his
own master, with a fortune just sufficient to
support him as an English gentleman of leisure
and fashion. For ten years he lived in London,
a member of Parliament, a placeman, and a
diner-out, and during those ten years he pro-
duced the first three volumes of his History.
After that he lost his place, failed to obtain
another, and, finding his income unequal to his
expenses, returned to Lausanne, where he took
up his residence in the house of a friend, over-

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looking the Lake of Geneva. It was the final
step in his career, and no less fortunate than all
the others. In Lausanne he was rich once more,
he was famous, he enjoyed a delightful combina-
tion of retirement and society. Before another
ten years were out he had completed his
History ; and in ease, dignity, and absolute
satisfaction his work in this world was accom-
plished.

One sees in such a life an epitome of the
blessings of the eighteenth century — the won-
derful fXTjSev ayav of that most balmy time — the
rich fruit ripening slowly on the sun-warmed
wall, and coming inevitably to its delicious
perfection. It is difficult to imagine, at any
other period in history, such a combination of
varied qualities, so beautifully balanced — the
profound scholar who was also a brilliant man
of the world — the votary of cosmopolitan culture,
who never for a moment ceased to be a supremely
English “ character.” The ten years of Gibbon’s
life in London afford an astonishing spectacle of
interacting energies. By what strange power did
he succeed in producing a masterpiece of
enormous erudition and perfect form, while he
was leading the gay life of a man about town,

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GIBBON

spending his evenings at White’s or Boodle’s or
the Club, attending Parliament, oscillating
between his house in Bentinck Street, his
country cottage at Hampton Court, and his
little establishment at Brighton, spending his
summers in Bath or Paris, and even, at odd
moments, doing a little work at the Board of
Trade, to show that his place was not entirely a
sinecure ? Such a triumph could only have been
achieved by the sweet reasonableness of the
eighteenth century. “ Monsieur Gibbon n’est
point mon homme,” said Rousseau. Decidedly !
The prophet of the coming age of sentiment and
romance could have nothing in common with
such a nature. It was not that the historian
was a mere frigid observer of the golden mean —
far from it. He was full of fire and feeling.
His youth had been at moments riotous — night
after night he had reeled hallooing down St.
James’s Street. Old age did not diminish the
natural warmth of his affections ; the beautiful
letter — a model of its kind — written on the death
of his aunt, in his fiftieth year, is a proof of it.
But the fire and the feeling were controlled and
co-ordinated. Boswell was a Rousseau-ite, one
of the first of the Romantics, an inveterate

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sentimentalist, and nothing could be more com-
plete than the contrast between his career and
Gibbon’s. He, too, achieved a glorious triumph ;
but it was by dint of the sheer force of native
genius asserting itself over the extravagance and
disorder of an agitated life — a life which, after a
desperate struggle, seemed to end at last in
darkness and shipwreck. With Gibbon there
was never any struggle : everything came
naturally to him — learning and dissipation,
industry and indolence, affection and scepticism
— in the correct proportions ; and he enjoyed
himself up to the very end.

To complete the picture one must notice
another antithesis : the wit, the genius, the
massive intellect, were housed in a physical
mould that was ridiculous. A little figure,
extraordinarily rotund, met the eye, surmounted
by a top-heavy head, with a button nose,
planted amid a vast expanse of cheek and ear,
and chin upon chin rolling downward. Nor was
this appearance only ; the odd shape reflected
something in the inner man. Mr. Gibbon, it
was noticed, was always slightly over-dressed ;
his favourite wear was flowered velvet. He was
a little vain, a little pompous ; at the first

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GIBBON

moment one almost laughed ; then one forgot
everything under the fascination of that even
flow of admirably intelligent, exquisitely turned,
and most amusing sentences. Among all his
other merits this obviously ludicrous egotism
took its place. The astonishing creature was
able to make a virtue even of absurdity. With-
out that touch of nature he would have run the
risk of being too much of a good thing ; as it
was there was no such danger ; he was pre-
posterous and a human being.

It is not difficult to envisage the character and
the figure ; what seems strange, and remote, and
hard to grasp is the connection between this
individual and the decline and fall of the Roman
Empire. The paradox, indeed, is so complete as
to be almost romantic. At a given moment —
October 15, 1764 — at a given place — the Capi-
toline Hill, outside the church of Aracoeli — the
impact occurred between the serried centuries of
Rome and Edward Gibbon. His life, his work,
his fame, his place in the history of civilisation,
followed from that circumstance. The point of
his achievement lay precisely in the extreme
improbability of it. The utter incongruity of
those combining elements produced the master-

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piece — the gigantic ruin of Europe through a
thousand years, mirrored in the mind of an
eighteenth-century English gentleman.

How was the miracle accomplished ? Need-
less to say, Gibbon was a great artist — one of
those rare spirits, with whom a vital and pene-
trating imagination and a supreme capacity for
general conceptions express themselves instinc-
tively in an appropriate form. That the
question has ever been not only asked but
seriously debated, whether History was an art,
is certainly one of the curiosities of human
ineptitude. What else can it possibly be? It
is obvious that History is not a science : it is
obvious that History is not the accumulation of
facts, but the relation of them. Only the
pedantry of incomplete academic persons could
have given birth to such a monstrous supposi-
tion. Facts relating to the past, when they are
collected without art, are compilations ; and
compilations, no doubt, may be useful ; but
they are no more History than butter, eggs,
salt and herbs are an omelette. That Gibbon
was a great artist, therefore, is implied in the
statement that he was a great historian ; but
what is interesting is the particular nature of his

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GIBBON

artistry. His whole genius was pre-eminently
classical ; order, lucidity, balance, precision —
the great classical qualities — dominate his work ;
and his History is chiefly remarkable as one of
the supreme monuments of Classic Art in
European literature.

“ L’ordre est ce qu’il y a dc plus rare dans
les operations de resprit.” Gibbon’s work is a
magnificent illustration of the splendid dictum
of Fenelon. He brought order out of the
enormous chaos of his subject — a truly stupen-
dous achievement ! With characteristic good
fortune, indeed, the material with which he had
to cope was still just not too voluminous to be
digested by a single extremely competent mind.
In the following century even a Gibbon would
have collapsed under the accumulated mass of
knowledge at his disposal. As it was, by dint
of a superb constructive* vision, a serene self-
confidence, a very acute judgment, and an
astonishing facility in the manipulation of
material, he was able to dominate the known
facts. To dominate, nothing more ; anything
else would have been foreign to his purpose.
He was a classicist ; and his object was not
comprehension but illumination. He drove a

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straight, firm road through the vast unexplored
forest of Roman history ; his readers could
follow with easy pleasure along the wonderful
way ; they might glance, as far as their eyes
could reach, into the entangled recesses on either
side of them ; but they were not invited to stop,
or wander, or camp out, or make friends with
the natives ; they must be content to look and
to pass on.

It is clear that Gibbon’s central problem was
the one of exclusion : how much, and what, was
he to leave out ? This was largely a question of
scale — always one of the major difficulties in
literary composition — and it appears from several
passages in the Autobiographies that Gibbon paid
particular attention to it. Incidentally, it may
be observed that the six Autobiographies were
not so much excursions in egotism — though no
doubt it is true that Gibbon was not without a
certain fondness for what he himself called “ the
most disgusting of the pronouns ” — as exercises
on the theme of scale. Every variety of com-
pression and expansion is visible among those
remarkable pages ; but apparently, since the
manuscripts were left in an unfinished state,
Gibbon still felt, after the sixth attempt, that he

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GIBBON

had not discovered the right solution. Even
with the scale of the History he was not alto-
gether satisfied ; the chapters on Christianity,
he thought, might, with further labour, have
been considerably reduced. But, even more
fundamental than the element of scale, there
was something else that, in reality, conditioned
the whole treatment of his material, the whole
scope and nature of his History ; and that was
the style in which it was written. The style once
fixed, everything else followed. Gibbon was
well aware of this. He wrote his first chapter
three times over, his second and third twice ;
then at last he was satisfied, and after that he
wrote on without a hitch. In particular the
problem of exclusion was solved. Gibbon’s
style is probably the most exclusive in literature.
By its very nature it bars out a great multitude
of human energies. It makes sympathy im-
possible, it takes no cognisance of passion, it
turns its back upon religion with a withering
smile. But that was just what was wanted.
Classic beauty came instead. By the penetrating
influence of style — automatically, inevitably —
lucidity, balance and precision were everywhere
introduced ; and the miracle of order was

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established over the chaos of a thousand
years.

Of course, the Romantics raised a protest.
“ Gibbon’s style,” said Coleridge, “ is detest-
able ; but,” he added, “ it is not the worst thing
about him.” Critics of the later nineteenth
century were less consistent. They admired
Gibbon for everything except his style, imagining
that his History would have been much improved
if it had been written in some other way ; they
did not see that, if it had been written in any
other way, it would have ceased to exist ; just
as St. Paul’s would cease to exist if it were rebuilt
in Gothic. Obsessed by the colour and move-
ment of romantic prose, they were blind to the
subtlety, the clarity, the continuous strength of
Gibbon’s writing. Gibbon could turn a bold
phrase with the best of them — “ the fat slumbers
of the Church,” for instance — if he wanted to ;
but he very rarely wanted to ; such effects would
have disturbed the easy, close-knit, homo-
geneous surface of his work. His use of words is,
in fact, extremely delicate. When, describing
St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar, he speaks of
“ this last and lofty station,” he succeeds, with
the least possible emphasis, merely by the

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combination of those two alliterative epithets
with that particular substantive, in making the
whole affair ridiculous. One can almost see his
shoulders shrug. The nineteenth century found
him pompous ; they did not relish the irony
beneath the pomp. He produces some of his
most delightful effects by rhythm alone. In the
Vindication — a work which deserves to be better
known, for it shows us Gibbon, as one sees him
nowhere else, really letting himself go — there is
an admirable example of this. “ I still think,”
he says, in reply to a criticism by Dr. Randolph,
“ I still think that an hundred Bishops, with
Athanasius at their head, were as competent
judges of the discipline of the fourth century, as
even the Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity
in the University of Oxford.” Gibbon’s irony,
no doubt, is the salt of his work ; but, like all
irony, it is the product of style. It was not for
nothing that he read through every year the
Lettres Provinciales of Pascal. From this point of
view it is interesting to compare him with
Voltaire. The irony of the great Frenchman
was a flashing sword — extreme, virulent, deadly
— a terrific instrument of propaganda. Gibbon
uses the weapon with far more delicacy ; he

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carves his enemy “ as a dish fit for the Gods ” ;
his mocking is aloof, almost indifferent, and
perhaps, in the long run, for that very reason,
even more effective.

At every period of his life Gibbon is a pleasant
thing to contemplate, but perhaps most pleasant
of all in the closing weeks of it, during his last
visit to England. He had hurried home from
Lausanne to join his friend Lord Sheffield,
whose wife had died suddenly, and who, he felt,
was in need of his company. The journey was
no small proof of his affectionate nature ; old
age was approaching ; he was corpulent, gouty,
and accustomed to every comfort ; and the war
of the French Revolution was raging in the
districts through which he had to pass. But he
did not hesitate, and after skirting the belligerent
armies in his chaise, arrived safely in England.
After visiting Lord Sheffield he proceeded to
Bath, to stay with his stepmother. The amazing
little figure, now almost spherical, bowled along
the Bath Road in the highest state of exhilara-
tion. “ I am always,” he told his friend, “ so
much delighted and improved with this union of
ease and motion, that, were not the expense
enormous, I would travel every year some

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hundred miles, more especially in England.”
Mrs. Gibbon, a very old lady, but still full of
vitality, worshipped her stepson, and the two
spent ten days together, talking, almost always
tete-a-tete, for ten hours a day. Then the
historian went off to Althorpe, where he spent
a happy morning with Lord Spencer, looking at
early editions of Cicero. And so back to
London. In London a little trouble arose. A
protuberance in the lower part of his person,
which, owing to years of characteristic insouciance ,
had grown to extraordinary proportions, required
attention ; an operation was necessary ; but it
went off well, and there seemed to be no danger.
Once more Mr. Gibbon dined out. Once more
he was seen, in his accustomed attitude, with
advanced forefinger, addressing the company,
and rapping his snuff box at the close of each
particularly pointed phrase. But illness came on
again — nothing very serious. The great man
lay in bed discussing how much longer he would
live — he was fifty-six— ten years, twelve years, or
perhaps twenty. He ate some chicken and
drank three glasses of madeira. Life seemed
almost as charming as usual. Next morning,
getting out of bed for a necessary moment, “ Je

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suis plus adroit,” he said with his odd smile to
his French valet. Back in bed again, he
muttered something more, a little incoherently,
lay back among the pillows, dozed, half-woke,
dozed again, and became unconscious — for ever.

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In Apollo’s house there are many mansions ;
there is even one (unexpectedly enough) for the
Philistine. So complex and various are the
elements of literature that no writer can be
damned on a mere enumeration of faults. He
may always possess merits which make up for
everything ; if he loses on the swings, he may
win on the roundabouts. Macaulay — whatever
the refined and the sublime may say to the
contrary — is an example of this. A coarse
texture of mind — a metallic style — an itch for
the obvious and the emphatic — a middle-class,
Victorian complacency — it is all too true ;
Philistine is, in fact, the only word to fit the
case ; and yet, by dint of sheer power of writing,
the Philistine has reached Parnassus. It is a
curious occurrence, and deserves a closer
examination.

What are the qualities that make a historian ?
Obviously these three — a capacity for absorbing

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facts, a capacity for stating them, and a point of
view. The two latter are connected, but not
necessarily inseparable. The late Professor
Samuel Gardiner, for instance, could absorb
facts, and he could state them ; but he had no
point of view ; and the result is that his book on
the most exciting period of English history
resembles nothing so much as a very large heap
of sawdust. But a point of view, it must be
remembered, by no means implies sympathy.
One might almost say that it implies the reverse.
At any rate it is curious to observe how many
instances there are of great historians who have
been at daggers drawn with their subjects.
Gibbon, a highly civilised scoffer, spent twenty
years of his life writing about barbarism and
superstition. Michelet was a romantic and a
republican ; but his work on medieval France
and the Revolution is far inferior to his
magnificent delineation of the classic and
despotic centuries. Macaulay’s great-nephew,
Professor Trevelyan, has, it is true, written a
delightful account of the Italian Risorgimento,
of which he is an enthusiastic devotee. But, even
here, the rule seems to apply ; one cannot but
feel that Professor Trevelyan’s epic would have

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MACAULAY

been still more delightful if it had contained a
little of the salt of criticism — if, in fact, he had
not swallowed Garibaldi whole.

As for Macaulay’s point of view, everyone
knows it was the Whig one. In reality this is
simplifying too much ; but, however we may
describe it, there can be no doubt that Macaulay’s
vision was singularly alien to the England of the
latter years of the seventeenth century. Like
Gibbon, like Michelet, like the later Carlyle, he
did not — to put it succinctly — understand what
he was talking about. Charles II, James II —
that whole strange age in which religion,
debauchery, intellect, faction, wit and brutality
seethed and bubbled together in such an extra-
ordinary olla podrida — escaped him. He could
see parts of it ; but he could not see into the
depths ; and so much the better : he had his
point of view. The definiteness, the fixity, of his
position is what is remarkable. He seems to
have been created en bloc. His manner never
changed ; as soon as he could write at all — at
the age of eight — he wrote in the style of his
History. The three main factors in his mental
growth— the Clapham sect, Cambridge, Holland
House — were not so much influences as suitable

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

environments for the development of a pre-
determined personality. Whatever had hap-
pened to him, he would always have been a
middle-class intellectual with Whig views. It is
possible, however, that he may actually have
gained something from Holland House. The
modern habit of gently laughing at Whigs and
Whiggery is based on a misconception. A
certain a priori stuffiness which seems to hang
about that atmosphere is in reality a Victorian
innovation. The true pre-Reform Bill Whig was a
tremendous aristocrat — the heir to a great tradi-
tion of intellectual independence and spiritual
pride. When the Hollands’ son travelled as a
youth in Italy he calmly noted in his diary that
someone he had met had a face “ almost as
stupid as the Duke of Wellington’s ” ; the young
Fox was a chip of the old block. Such surround-
ings must have been good for Macaulay. It was
not only that they supported his self-confidence —
he had enough of that already — but that they
brought him into touch with the severity, the
grandeur, and the amenity of an old civilisation.
Without them he might have been provincial
or academic ; but he was not so ; on every
page of his work one sees the manifest signs

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MACAULAY

of the culture and the traffic of the great
world.

Thus Macaulay’s Whiggism was a composite
affair — it was partly eighteenth century and
partly Victorian. But the completeness with
which it dominated him gave him his certainty
of attitude and his clarity of vision. It enabled
him to stand up against the confusion and frenzy
of the seventeenth century and say, very loudly
and very distinctly, what he thought of it. So
far so good. The misfortune is that what he
thought was not of a finer quality. The point of
view is distinct enough, but it is without distinc-
tion ; and Macaulay in consequence remains an
excellent but not a supreme historian. His
Whiggism was in itself a very serious drawback —
not because it was a cause of bias, but because it
was a symptom of crudity. The bias was of the
wrong kind ; it was the outcome of party
politics, and the sad truth is that, in the long
run, party politics become a bore. They did
not, indeed, succeed in making Macaulay a
bore ; that was impossible ; but, though he is
never dull, one constantly feels that he might
have been much more interesting. Too often
he misses the really exciting, the really fasdnat-

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ing, point. And how can one fail to miss a
great deal if one persists in considering the
world from one side or other of the House of
Commons ?

A certain crudity, a certain coarseness of fibre
— the marks of a party politician — are particu-
larly obvious in those character sketches of great
persons which form so important a part of
Macaulay’s History. Within their limits they
are admirably done ; but their limits are too
narrow. They lack colour ; they are steel
engravings — unsatisfactory compromises between
a portrait in oils and a realistic snapshot. One
has only to compare them with Clarendon’s
splendid presentments to realise their inadequacy.
With what a gorgeous sinuosity, with what a
grandiose delicacy, the older master elaborates,
through his enormous sentences, the lineaments
of a soul ! Beside them the skimpy lines and
cheap contrasts of Macaulay’s black and white
are all too obvious.

But the Whig politician was not only crude ;
he was also, to a strange degree, ingenuous and
complacent. A preposterous optimism fills his
pages. The Revolution of 1688 having suc-
ceeded, all was well ; Utopia was bound to

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follow ; and it actually had followed — in the
reign of Victoria. Thus he contrasts with
delight, almost with awe, the state of Torbay at
the time of William’s landing and its condition
in 1850. In 1688 “ the huts of ploughmen and
fishermen were thinly scattered over what is
now the site of crowded marts and of luxurious
pavilions.” A description of the modern
Torquay becomes irresistible. “ The inhabi-
tants are about ten thousand in number. The
newly-built churches and chapels, the baths and
libraries, the hotels and public gardens, the
infirmary and the museum, the white streets,
rising terrace above terrace, the gay villas
peeping from the midst of shrubberies and flower
beds, present a spectacle widely different from
any that in the seventeenth century England
could show.” They do indeed.

The style is the mirror of the mind, and
Macaulay’s style is that of a debater. The hard
points are driven home like nails with unfailing
dexterity ; it is useless to hope for subtlety or
refinement ; one cannot hammer with delicacy.
The repetitions, the antitheses, resemble re-
volving cog-wheels ; and indeed the total result
produces an effect which suggests the opera-

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tions of a machine more than anything else — a
comparison which, no doubt, would have
delighted Macaulay. The descriptive passages
are the most deplorable. In a set-piece, such as
the account of Westminster Hall at the impeach-
ment of Hastings, all the horrors of a remorseless
rhetoric are made manifest. From the time of
Cicero downwards, the great disadvantage of
oratory has been that it never lets one off. One
must hear everything, however well one knows
it, and however obvious it is. For such writers
a dose of Stendhal is to be recommended.
Macaulay, however, would not have benefited by
the prescription, for he was a hopeless case.
The tonic pages of the Chartreuse de Parme would
have had no effect on him whatever. When he
wished to state that Schomberg was buried in
Westminster Abbey, he had to say that “ the
illustrious warrior ” was laid in “ that venerable
abbey, hallowed by the dust of many generations
of princes, heroes and poets.” There is no
escaping it ; and the incidental drawback that
Schomberg was not buried at Westminster at
all, but in Dublin, is, in comparison with the
platitude of the style, of very small importance.

The curiously metallic quality in Macaulay’s

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writing — its hardness of outline, its slightly
hollow ring — is so characteristic that it is
difficult not to see in it the indication of some
profound psychological state. The stout, square
man with the prodigious memory and the in-
exhaustible capacity for conversation, was appar-
ently a normal human being, except in one
direction : he never married, and there seems
no reason to suppose that he was ever in love.
An entertaining essay might perhaps be written
on the sexlessness of historians ; but it would be
entertaining and nothing more : we do not know
enough either about the historians or sex. Yet,
in Macaulay’s case, one cannot resist the con-
clusion that the absence from his make-up of
intense physical emotion brought a barrenness
upon his style. His sentences have no warmth
and no curves ; the embracing fluidity of love
is lacking. And it is noticeable how far more
effective he is in his treatment of those whom he
dislikes than of those whom he admires. His
Marlborough is a fine villain. His James II is
a caricature, with a queer vitality of its own —
the vitality of a marionette. But his William of
Orange is a failure — a lifeless image of waxwork
perfection. Macaulay’s inability to make his

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hero live — his refusal to make any attempt to
illuminate the mysteries of that most obscure
and singular character — epitomises all that is
weakest in his work.

Probably the futility of his aesthetic judgments
was another effect of the same cause. Whenever
he writes of pure poetry — in the essay on Byron,
for instance — he is plainly at sea ; his lack of
sensibility becomes painfully obvious. A true
child of his age, he had a profound distrust,
amounting at times to an actual hatred, of art.
That Queen Mary should have ruined her
father, turned him out of his kingdom, and
seized his throne for herself— all that was no
blemish at all on her character : was she not
acting upon strictly Whig principles ? But one
fault she did have. She was responsible for “ a
frivolous and inelegant fashion.” She was the
first person in England to form “ a vast collec-
tion of hideous images, and of vases on which
houses, trees, bridges and mandarins were
depicted in outrageous defiance of all the laws
of perspective.” Qpeen Mary, in fact, liked
china ; and that could not be forgiven her.

The weaknesses are obvious, and the strength,
suitably enough, is obvious too. History is

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MACAULAY

primarily a narrative, and in power of narration
no one has ever surpassed Macaulay. In that he
is a genius. When it comes to telling a story, his
faults disappear or change into virtues. Narrow-
ness becomes clarity, and crudity turns into
force. The rhetoric of the style, from being the
ornament of platitude, becomes the servant of
excitement. Every word is valuable : there is
no hesitation, no confusion, and no waste. It is
clear from his journal that Macaulay realised the
dominating importance of this side of his work.
He laboured at his purely narrative passages for
weeks at a time, with the result that they are
masterpieces. Nobody who has once read them
can ever forget his account of the trial of the
Bishops, the siege of Derry, and the battle of
Killiecrankie. To write so is to write magnifi-
cently, and if one has to be a Philistine to bring
off those particular effects one can only say, so
much the better for the Philistine. But it is not
only in certain passages that Macaulay triumphs.
His whole History is conditioned by a supreme
sense of the narrative form. It presses on, with
masterly precipitation, from start to finish.
Everything falls into place. Unsatisfying char-
acters, superficial descriptions, jejune reflections.

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are seen to be no longer of importance in them-
selves — they are merely stages in the develop-
ment of the narrative. They are part of the
pattern — the enthralling, ever-shifting pattern of
the perfect kaleidoscope. A work of art ? Yes,
there is no denying it : the Philistine was also
an artist. And there he is — squat, square and
perpetually talking — on Parnassus.

CARLYLE

Mv grandfather, Edward Strachey, an Anglo-
Indian of cultivation and intelligence, once
accompanied Carlyle on an excursion to Paris
in pre-railroad days. At their destination the
postilion asked my grandfather for a tip ; but
the reply — it is Carlyle who tells the story — was
a curt refusal, followed by the words — “ Vous
avez driv£ devilish slow.” The reckless insularity
of this remark illustrates well enough the extra-
ordinary change which had come over the
English governing classes since the eighteenth
century. Fifty years earlier a cultivated English-
man would have piqued himself upon answering
the postilion in the idiom and the accent of
Paris. But the Napoleonic wars, the industrial
revolution, the romantic revival, the Victorian
spirit, had brought about a relapse from the
cosmopolitan suavity of eighteenth-century cul-
ture ; the centrifugal forces, always latent in
English life, had triumphed, and men’s minds

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had shot off into the grooves of eccentricity and
provincialism. It is curious to notice the flux
and reflux of these tendencies in the history of
our literature : the divine amenity of Chaucer
followed by the no less divine idiosyncrasy of
the Elizabethans ; the exquisite vigour of the
eighteenth century followed by the rampant
vigour of the nineteenth ; and to-day the return
once more towards the Latin elements in our
culture, the revulsion from the Germanic
influences which obsessed our grandfathers, the
preference for what is swift, what is well arranged,
and what is not too good.

Carlyle was not an English gentleman, he was
a Scotch peasant ; and his insularity may be
measured accordingly — by a simple sum in pro-
portion. In his youth, no doubt, he had German
preoccupations ; but on the whole he is, with
Dickens, probably the most complete example
of a home growth which the British Islands have
to offer to the world. The result is certainly
remarkable. There is much to be said for the
isolated productions of special soils ; they are
full of strength and character ; their freedom
from outside forces releases in them a spring of
energy which leads, often enough, to astonishing

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CARLYLE

consequences. In Carlyle’s case the release was
terrific. His vitality burst out into an enormous
exuberance, filling volume after volume with
essays, histories, memoirs and philosophisings,
pouring itself abroad through an immense
correspondence, and erupting for eighty years in
a perpetual flood of red-hot conversation. The
achievements of such a spirit take one’s breath
away ; one gazes in awe at the serried row of
heavy books on the shelf ; one reads on and on
until one’s eyes are blinded by the endless glare
of that aurora borealis, and one’s ears deafened
by the roar and rattle of that inexhaustible
artillery. Then one recovers — very quickly.
That is the drawback. The northern lights,
after all, seem to give out no heat, and the great
guns were only loaded with powder. So, at any
rate, it appears to a perverse generation. It was
all very well in the days when English gentlemen
could say with perfect sang-froid “ Vous avez
drive devilish slow ” to French postilions. Then
the hurricane that was Carlyle came into contact
with what was exactly appropriate to it —
gnarled oaks — solitary conifers ; and tire effect
was sublime ; leaves whirled, branches crashed,
and fathers of the forest were uprooted. But

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

nowadays it hurls itself upon a congregation of
tremulous reeds ; they bend down low, to the
very earth, as the gale passes ; and then immedi-
ately they spring up again, and are seen to be
precisely as they were before.

The truth is that it is almost as fatal to have
too much genius as too little. What was really
valuable in Carlyle was ruined by his colossal
powers and his unending energy. It is easy to
perceive that, amid all the rest of his qualities,
he was an artist. He had a profound relish for
words ; he had a sense of style which developed,
gradually and consistently, into interesting and
original manifestations ; he had an imaginative
eye ; he had a grim satiric humour. This
was an admirable outfit for a historian and a
memoir writer, and it is safe to prophesy that
whatever is permanent in Carlyle’s work will be
found in that section of his writings. But, unfor-
tunately, the excellence, though it is undoubt-
edly there, is a fitful and fragmentary one. There
are vivid flashes and phrases — visions thrown up
out of the darkness of the past by the bull’s-eye
lantern of a stylistic imagination — Coleridge
at Highgate, Maupertuis in Berlin, the grotesque
image of the “ sea-green Incorruptible ” ;

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CARLYLE

there are passages of accomplished carica-
ture, and climaxes of elaborately characteristic
writing ; and then the artist’s hand falters, his
eye wanders, his mind is distracted and led
away. One has only to compare Carlyle with
Tacitus to realise what a disadvantage it is to
possess unlimited powers. The Roman master,
undisturbed by other considerations, was able to
devote himself entirely to the creation of a work
of art. He triumphed : supremely conscious
both of his capacities and his intentions, he built
up a great design, which in all its parts was
intense and beautiful. The Carlylean qualities —
the satiric vision, the individual style — were his ;
but how differently he used them ! He composed
a tragedy, while Carlyle spent himself in melo-
drama ; he made his strange sentences the
expression of a profound personality, while
Carlyle’s were the vehicle of violence and
eccentricity.

The stem child of Ecclefechan held artists in
low repute, and no doubt would have been
disgusted to le am that it was in that guise that
he would win the esteem of posterity. He had
higher views : surely he would be remembered
as a prophet. And no doubt he had many of

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

the qualifications for that profession — a loud
voice, a bold face, and a bad temper. But un-
fortunately there was one essential characteristic
that he lacked — he was not dishonoured in his
own country. Instead of being put into a pit
and covered with opprobrium, he made a
comfortable income, was supplied by Mrs.
Carlyle with everything that he wanted, and
was the favourite guest at Lady Ashburton’s
fashionable parties. Prophecies, in such circum-
stances, however voluminous and disagreeable
they may be, are apt to have something wrong
with them. And, in any case, who remembers
prophets? Isaiah and Jeremiah, no doubt,
have gained a certain reputation ; but then
Isaiah and Jeremiah have had the extraordinary
good fortune to be translated into English by a
committee of Elizabethan bishops.

To be a prophet is to be a moralist, and it was
the moral preoccupation in Carlyle’s mind that
was particularly injurious to his artistic instincts.
In Latin countries — the fact is significant —
morals and manners are expressed by the same
word ; in England it is not so j to some Britons,
indeed, the two notions appear to be positively
antithetical. Perhaps this is a mistake. Perhaps

1 86

CARLYLE

if Carlyle’s manners had been more polished his
morals would have been less distressing. Morality,
curiously enough, seems to belong to that class of
things which are of the highest value, which
perform a necessary function, which are, in fact,
an essential part of the human mechanism, but
which should only be referred to with the
greatest circumspection. Carlyle had no notion
that this was the case, and the result was
disastrous. In his history, especially, it is
impossible to escape from the devastating effects
of his reckless moral sense.

Perhaps it is the platitude of such a state of
mind that is its most exasperating quality.
Surely, one thinks, poor Louis XV might be
allowed to die without a sermon from Chelsea.
But no ! The opportunity must not be missed ;
the preacher draws a long breath, and expatiates
with elaborate emphasis upon all that is most
obvious about mortality, crowns, and the futility
of self-indulgence. But an occasional platitude
can be put up with ; what is really intolerable is
the all-pervadingness of the obsession. There are
some German cooks who have a passion for
caraway seeds : whatever dish they are pre-
paring, from whipped cream to legs of mutton,

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

they cannot keep them out. Very soon one
begins to recognise the fatal flavour ; one lies
in horrified wait for it ; it instantly appears ;
and at last the faintest suspicion of caraway
almost produces nausea. The histories of
Carlyle (and no less, it may be observed in
passing, the novels of Thackeray) arouse those
identical sensations — the immediate recognition
of the first approaches of the well-known whiff
— the inevitable saturation — the heart that sinks
and sinks. And, just as one sometimes feels that
the cook was a good cook, and that the dish
would have been done to a turn if only the
caraway canister could have been kept out of
reach, so one perceives that Carlyle had a true
gift for history which was undone by his moralisa-
tions. There is an imaginative greatness in his
conception of Cromwell, for instance, a vigour
and a passion in the presentment of it ; but all
is spoilt by an overmastering desire to turn the
strange Protector into a moral hero after
Carlyle’s own heart, so that, after all, the lines
are blurred, the composition is confused, and the
picture unconvincing.

But the most curious consequence of this
predilection is to be seen in his Frederick the

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CARLYLE

Great. In his later days Carlyle evolved a kind
of super-morality by which all the most un-
pleasant qualities of human nature — egotism,
insensitiveness, love of power — became the
object of his religious adoration — a monstrous
and inverted ethic, combining every possible
disadvantage of virtue and of vice. He then, for
some mysterious reason, pitched upon Frederick
of Prussia as the great exemplar of this system,
and devoted fourteen years of ceaseless labour to
the elucidation of his history. Never was a mis-
conception more complete. Frederick was in
reality a knave of genius, a sceptical, eighteenth-
century gambler with a strong will and a turn
for organisation ; and this was the creature
whom Carlyle converted into an Ideal Man, a
God-like Hero, a chosen instrument of the
Eternal Powers. What the Eternal Powers
would have done if a stray bullet had gone
through Frederick’s skull in the battle of
Molwitz, Carlyle does not stop to inquire. By
an ironical chance there happened to be two
attractive elements in Frederick’s mental outfit ;
he had a genuine passion for French literature,
and he possessed a certain scurrilous wit, which
constantly expressed itself in extremely truculent

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

matter. She might have become a consummate
writer or the ruler and inspirer of some fortunate
social group ; but all that was out of the
question ; was she not Mrs. Carlyle ? It was
her business to suppress her own instincts, to
devote her whole life to the arrangement of his
domestic comforts, to listen for days at a time,
as she lay racked with illness on the sofa, to his
descriptions of the battles of Frederick the Great.
The lime came when she felt that she could bear
it no longer, and that at all hazards she must free
herself from those stifling bonds. It is impossible
not to wish that she had indeed fled as she
intended with the unknown man of her choice.
The blow to Carlyle’s egoism would have been
so dramatic, and the upheaval in that well-
conducted world so satisfactory to contemplate !
But, at the last moment, she changed her mind.
Curiously enough, when it came to the point,
it turned out that Mrs. Carlyle agreed with her
husband. Even that bold spirit succumbed to
the influences that surrounded it ; she, too, was
a mid- Victorian at heart. The woman’s tragedy
may be traced in those inimitable letters, whose
intoxicating merriment flashes like lightning
about the central figure, as it moves in sinister

CARLYLE

desolation against the background of a most
peculiar age : an age of barbarism and prudery,
of nobility and cheapness, of satisfaction and
desperation ; an age in which everything was
discovered and nothing known ; an age in
which all the outlines were tremendous and all
the details sordid ; when gas-jets struggled feebly
through the circumambient fog, when the hour
of dinner might be at any moment between two
and six, when the doses of rhubarb were periodic
and gigantic, when pet dogs threw themselves
out of upper storey windows, when cooks reeled
drunk in areas, when one sat for hours with
one’s feet in dirty straw dragged along the streets
by horses, when an antimacassar was on every
chair, and the baths were minute tin circles, and
the beds were full of bugs and disasters.

After it was all over and his wife was dead,
Carlyle realised what had happened. But all
that he could do was to take refuge from the
truth in the vain vehemence of sentimental self-
reproaches. He committed his confessions to
Froude without sufficient instructions ; and
when he died he left behind him a legacy of
doubt and scandal. But now, at length, some
enjoyment appeared upon the scene. No one

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PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

was happier than Froude, with an agitated
conscience and a sense of duty that involved the
divulgation of dreadful domesticities ; while the
Victorian public feasted upon the unexpected
banquet to its heart’s content.

*94

FROUDE

James Anthony Froude was one of the salient
figures of mid-Victorian England. In that
society of prepotent personages he more than
held his own. He was not merely the author of
the famous History ; he was a man of letters who
was also a man of the world, an accomplished
gentleman, whose rich nature overflowed with
abounding energy, a sportsman, a yachtsman, a
brilliant and magnificent talker — and something
more : one in whose presence it was impossible
not to feel a hint of mystery, of strange
melancholy, an uncomfortable suggestion of
enigmatic power. His most impressive appear-
ance completed the effect : the height, the long,
pale face, the massive, vigorous features, the
black hair and eyebrows, and the immense eyes,
with their glowing darkness, whose colour — so a
careful observer noted — was neither brown, nor
blue, nor black, but red. What was the explana-
tion of it all ? What was the inner cause of this

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brio and this sadness, this passionate earnestness
and this sardonic wit? One wonders, as his
after-dinner listeners used to wonder, in the
’sixties, with a little shiver, while the port went
round, and the ladies waited in the drawing-
room.

Perhaps it is easier for us than for them to
make, at any rate, a guess ; for we know more
of the facts, and we have our modern psychology
to give us confidence. Perhaps the real explana-
tion was old Mr. Froude, who was a hunting
parson of a severely conventional type, with a
marked talent for water-colours. Mrs. Froude
had died early, leaving the boy to be brought
up by this iron-bound clergyman and some
brothers much older than himself. His child-
hood was wretched, his boyhood was frightful.
He was sent, ill and overgrown, to college at
Westminster, and there — it was, as the bio-
graphers dutifully point out, in the bad old days
before the influence of Dr. Arnold had turned
the Public Schools into models of industry and
civilised behaviour — he suffered, for two years,
indescribable torment. He was removed in
disgrace, flogged by his father for imaginary
delinquencies, and kept at home for two years

FROUDE

more in the condition of an outcast. His eldest
brother, Hurrell, who was one of the leaders in
the new fashion of taking Christianity seriously,
and mortified his own flesh by eating fish on
Fridays, egged on the parental discipline with
pious glee. At last, grown too old for castiga-
tion, the lad was allowed to go to Oxford.
There, for the first time in his life, he began to
enjoy himself, and became engaged to an
attractive young lady. But he had run up bills
with the Oxford tradesmen, had told his father
they were less than they were, the facts had come
out, and old Mr. Froude, declaring that his son
was little better than a common swindler,
denounced him as such to the young lady’s
father, who thereupon broke off the engagement.
It seems surprising that Anthony resisted the
temptation of suicide — that he had the strength
and the courage to outface his misfortunes, to
make a career for himself and become a highly
successful man. What is more surprising is that
his attitude towards his father never ceased,
from first to last, to be one of intense admiration.
He might struggle, he might complain, he might
react, but he always, with a strange overpowering
instinctiveness, adored. Old Mr. Froude had

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drawn a magic circle round his son, from which
escape was impossible ; and the creature whose
life had been almost ruined by his father’s moral
cruelty, who — to all appearances — had thrown
off the yoke, and grown into maturity with the
powerful, audacious, sceptical spirit of a free
man, remained, in fact, in secret servitude — a
disciplinarian, a Protestant, even a church-goer,
to the very end.

Possibly the charm might have been exorcised
by an invocation to science, but Froude remained
curiously aloof from the dominating influence of
his age ; and instead, when his father had
vanished, submitted himself to Carlyle. The
substitution was symptomatic : the new father
expressed in explicit dogma the unconscious
teaching of the old. To the present generation
Carlyle presents a curious problem — it is so very
difficult to believe that real red-hot lava ever
flowed from that dry, neglected crater ; but the
present generation never heard Carlyle talk. For
many years Froude heard little else : he became
an evangelist ; but when he produced his gospel
it met, like some others, with a mixed reception.
The Victorian public, unable to understand a
form of hero-worship which laid bare the faults

FROUDE

of the hero, was appalled, and refused to believe
what was the simple fact — that Froude’s adora-
tion was of so complete a kind that it shrank with
horror from the notion of omitting a single wart
from the portrait. To us the warts are obvious :
our only difficulty is to account for the adoration.
However, since it led incidentally to the publica-
tion of Mrs. Carlyle’s letters as well as her
husband’s, we can only be thankful.

The main work of Froude’s life, the History of
England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the
Spanish Armada , began to appear in 1856, and
was completed in 1870. It is undoubtedly a
deeply interesting book, full of thought, of
imagination and of excitement, the product of
great industry and great power of writing :
whether it ranks among the small first class of
histories is less certain. Contemporary critics
found much to complain of in it, but their
strictures were, on the whole, beside the mark.
Among them the most formidable was Professor
Freeman, who dissected Froude with the utmost
savagery month after month and year after year
in the pages of the Saturday Review. Freeman
was a man of considerable learning, and of an
ill temper even more considerable ; his minute

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knowledge of the Early English, his passionate
devotion to the Anglo-Saxons, and his intimate
conviction (supported by that of Dr. Stubbs),
that he (with the possible exception of Dr.
Stubbs) was the supreme historian, made a
strange mixture in his mind, boiling and
simmering together over the flames of a tempera-
mental vexation. Unfortunately no particle of
this heat ever reached his printed productions,
which were remarkable for their soporific
qualities and for containing no words but those
of Anglo-Saxon descent. The spirit, not only of
the school but of the Sunday school, was what
animated those innumerable pages, adorning
with a parochial earnestness the heavy burden
of research. Naturally enough Froude’s work,
so coloured, so personal, so obviously written
by somebody who was acquainted with the
world as well as Oxford, acted like a red rag on
the professor. He stormed, he stamped, his fiery
and choleric beard shook with indignation. He
declared that the book was a mass of inaccuracies
and a dastardly attack upon the Church of
England. The former accusation was the more
important, and the professor devoted years to
the proof of it. Unluckily for him, however, the

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FROUDE

years only revealed more and more clearly the
indisputable value of Froude’s work in the
domain of pure erudition. He was not a careful
transcriber, and he occasionally made a down-
right blunder ; but such blemishes are of small
moment compared with the immense addition he
made to historical knowledge by his exploration
and revelation of the manuscripts at Simancas.
Froude was dignified ; he kept silence for
twenty years, and then replied to his tormentor in
an article so crushing as to elicit something
almost like an apology.

But he was more completely avenged in a
very different and quite unexpected manner.
Mr. Horace Round, a “ burrower into worm-
holes ** living in Brighton, suddenly emerged
from the parchments among which he spent
his life deliciously gnawing at the pedigrees
of the proudest families of England, and in
a series of articles fell upon Freeman with
astonishing force. The attack was particularly
serious because it was delivered at the strongest
point in the professor’s armour — his exactitude,
his knowledge of his authorities, his undeviating
attention to fact, and it was particularly galling
because it was directed against the very crown

201

o

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

and culmination of the professor’s history — his
account of the Battle of Hastings. With masterly
skill Mr. Round showed that, through a variety
of errors, the whole nature of the battle had been
misunderstood and misrepresented ; more than
that, he proved that the name of “ Senlac ” with
which Freeman had christened it, and which he
had imposed upon the learned world, was
utterly without foundation, and had been
arrived at by a foolish mistake. Mr. Round was
an obscure technician, but he deserves the grati-
tude of Englishmen for having extirpated that
odious word from their vocabulary. The effect
of these articles on Freeman was alarming ; his
blood boiled, but he positively made no reply.
For years the attacks continued, and for years
the professor was dumb. Fulminating rejoinders
rushed into his brain, only to be whisked away
again — they were not quite fulminating enough.
The most devastating article of all was written,
was set up in proof, but was not yet published ;
it contained the exposS of “ Senlac,” and rumours
of its purport and approaching appearance were
already flying about in museums and common-
rooms. Freeman was aghast at this last im-
pertinence ; but still he nursed his wrath. Like

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FROUDE

King Lear, he would do such things— what they
were yet he knew not— but they should be the
terrors of the earth. At last, silent and purple,
he gathered his female attendants about him,
and left England for an infuriated holiday.
There was an ominous pause ; and then the fell
news reached Brighton. The professor had gone
pop in Spain. Mr. Round, however, was
remorseless, and published. It was left for his
adversary’s pupils and admirers to struggle with
him as best they could, but they did so ineffec-
tively ; and he remained, like the Normans, in
possession of the field.

A true criticism of Froude’s History implies a
wider view than Freeman’s. The theme of the
book was the triumph of the Reformation in
England — a theme not only intensely dramatic
in itself, but one which raised a multitude of
problems of profound and perennial interest.
Froude could manage the drama (though in his
hands it sometimes degenerated into melo-
drama) well enough : it was his treatment of
the philosophical issues that was defective.
Carlyle — it seems hardly credible — actually
believed that the Revolution was to be explained
as a punishment meted out to France for her

PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE

loose living in the eighteenth century ; and
Froude’s ethical conceptions, though they were
not quite so crude, belonged to the same infantile
species as his master’s. The Protestants were
right and the Catholics were wrong. Henry VIII
enabled the Protestants to win, therefore Henry
VIII was an admirable person : such was the
kind of proposition by which Froude’s attitude
towards that period of vast and complicated
import was determined. His Carlylean theories
demanded a hero, and Henry VIII came pat to
hand ; he refused to see — what is plain to any
impartial observer — that the Defender of the
Faith combined in a peculiar manner the un-
pleasant vices of meanness and brutality ; no 1
he made the Reformation — he saved England —
he was a demi-god. How the execution of
Catherine Howard — a young girl who amused
herself— helped forward Protestant England, we
are not told. Froude’s insensitiveness to cruelty
becomes, indeed, at times, almost pathological.
When King and Parliament between them have
a man boiled alive in Smithfield Market, he is
favouiably impressed ; it is only when Pro-
testants are tortured that there is talk of
martyrdom. The bias, no doubt, gives a spice

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FROUDE

to the work, but it is a cheap spice — bought, one
feels, at the Co-operative Stores. The Whiggery
of Macaulay may be tiresome, but it has the
flavour of an aristocracy about it, of a high
intellectual tradition ; while Froude’s Pro-
testantism is — there is really only one word for
it — provincial.

A certain narrowness of thought and feeling :
that may be forgiven, if it is expressed in a style
of sufficient mastery. Froude was an able, a
brilliant writer, copious and vivid, with a
picturesque imagination and a fine command of
narrative. His grand set-pieces — the execution
of Somerset and Mary Queen of Scots, the end of
Cranmer, the ruin of the Armada— go off
magnificently, and cannot be forgotten ; and,
apart from these, the extraordinary succession of
events assumes, as it flows through his pages, the
thrilling lineaments of a great story, upon whose
issue the most blast reader is forced to hang
entranced. Yet the supreme quality of style
seems to be lacking. One is uneasily aware of a
looseness in the texture, an absence of concentra-
tion in the presentment, a failure to fuse the
whole material into organic life. Perhaps, after
all, it is the intellect and the emotion that are at

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fault here too ; perhaps when one is hoping for
genius, it is only talent — only immense talent —
that one finds. One thinks of the mysterious
wisdom of Thucydides, of the terrific force of
Tacitus, of the Gibbonian balance and lucidity
and co-ordination — ah ! to few, to very few,
among historians is it granted to bring the
Krrjfi a is ael into the world. And yet ... if
only, one feels, this gifted, splendid man could
have stepped back a little, could have withdrawn
from the provinciality of Protestantism and the
crudity of the Carlylean dogma, could have
allowed himself, untrammelled, to play upon his
subject with his native art and his native wit !
Then, surely, he would have celebrated other
virtues besides the unpleasant ones ; he would
have seen some drawbacks to power and
patriotism, he would have preferred civilisation
to fanaticism, and Queen Elizabeth to John
Knox. He might even have written immortal
English. But alas 1 these are vain specula-
tions ; old Mr. Froude would never have per-
mitted anything of the sort.

206

CREIGHTON

The Church of England is one of the most extra-
ordinary of institutions. An incredible concoc-
tion of Queen Elizabeth’s, it still flourishes,
apparently, and for three hundred years has
remained true to type. Or perhaps, in reality,
Qjieen Elizabeth had not very much to do with
it ; perhaps she only gave, with her long, strong
fingers, the final twist to a stem that had been
growing for ages, deep-rooted in the national
life. Certainly our cathedrals — so careful and so
unsesthetic, so class-conscious and so competent
— suggest that view of the case. English Gothic
seems to show that England was Anglican long
before the Reformation — as soon as she ceased to
be Norman, in fact. Pure piety, it cannot be
denied, has never been her Church’s strong
point. Anglicanism has never produced — never
could produce — a St. Teresa. The character-
istic great men of the institution — Whitgift,
Hooker, Laud, Butler, Jowett— have always been

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remarkable for virtues of a more secular kind :
those of scholarship or of administrative energy.
Mandell Creighton was (perhaps) the last of the
long line. Perhaps ; for who can tell ? It is '
difficult to believe that a man of Creighton’s
attainments will ever again be Bishop of London.
That particular concatenation seems to have
required a set of causes to bring it into existence
— a state of society, a habit of mind — which
have become obsolete. But the whirligigs of
time are, indeed, unpredictable ; and England,
some day or other, may well be blessed with
another Victorian Age.

In Creighton both the great qualities of
Anglican tradition were present to a remarkable
degree. It would be hard to say whether he
were more distinguished as a scholar or a man
of affairs ; but — such is the rather unfair persis-
tence of the written word — there can be little
doubt that he will be remembered chiefly as the
historian of the Papacy. Born when the world
was becoming extremely scientific, he belonged
to the post-Carlyle-and-Macaulay generation —
the school of Oxford and Cambridge inquirers,
who sought to reconstruct the past solidly and
patiently, with nothing but facts to assist them—

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CREIGHTON

pure facts, untwisted by political or meta-
physical bias and uncoloured by romance. In
this attempt Creighton succeeded admirably.
He was industrious, exact, clear-headed, and
possessed of a command over words that was
quite sufficient for his purposes. He succeeded
more completely than Professor Samuel Gardiner,
whose history of the Early Stuarts and the Civil
Wars was a contemporary work. Gardiner did
his best, but he was not an absolute master of the
method. Strive as he would, he could not
prevent himself, now and then, from being a
little sympathetic to one or other of his person-
ages ; sometimes he positively alluded to a
physical circumstance ; in short, humanity
would come creeping in. A mistake ! For
Professor Gardiner’s feelings about mankind are
not illuminating ; and the result is a slight blur.
Creighton was made of sterner stuff. In his
work a perfectly grey light prevails everywhere ;
there is not a single lapse into psychological
profundity ; every trace of local colour, every
suggestion of personal passion, has been studi-
ously removed. In many ways all this is a great
comfort. One is not worried by moral lectures
or purple patches, and the field is kept clear for

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what Creighton really excelled in— the lucid
exposition of complicated political transactions,
and the intricate movements of thought with
which they were accompanied. The biscuit is
certainly exceedingly dry ; but at any rate there
are no weevils in it. As one reads, one gets to
relish, with a sober satisfaction, this plumless
fare. It begins to be very nearly a pleasure to
follow the intrigues of the great Councils, or to
tread the labyrinth of the theological theory of
indulgences. It is a curious cross-section of
history that Creighton offers to the view. He
has cut the great tree so near to the ground that
leaf and flower have vanished ; but he has
worked his saw with such steadiness and pre-
cision that every grain in the wood is visible,
and one can look down at the mighty structure,
revealed in all its complex solidity like a map to
the mind’s eye.

Charming, indeed, are the ironies of history ;
and not the least charming those that involve
the historian. It was very natural that Creigh-
ton, a clever and studious clergyman of the
Church of England, should choose as the subject
of his investigations that group of events which,
centring round the Italian popes, produced at

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last the Reformation. The ironical fact was that
those events happened to take place in a world
where no clever and studious clergyman of the
Church of England had any business to be.
“ Sobriety,” as he himself said, was his aim ;
but what could sobriety do when faced with such
figures as Savonarola, Ceesar Borgia, Julius II,
and Luther? It could only look somewhere
else. It is pleasant to witness the high-minded
husband and father, the clever talker at
Cambridge dinner tables, the industrious dio-
cesan administrator, picking his way with an air
of calm detachment amid the recklessness, the
brutality, the fanaticism, the cynicism, the
lasciviousness, of those Renaissance spirits. " In
his private life,” Creighton says of Alexander VI,
“ it is sufficiently clear that he was at little pains
to repress a strongly sensual nature. . . . We
may hesitate to believe the worst charges
brought against him ; but the evidence is too
strong to enable us to admit that even after his
accession to the papal office he discontinued the
irregularities of his previous life.” There is high
comedy in such a tone on such a topic. One can
imagine the father of the Borgias, if he could
have read that sentence, throwing up his hands

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in delighted amazement, and roaring out the
obscene blasphemy of his favourite oath.

The truth was that, in spite of his wits and his
Oxford training, the admirable north-country
middle-class stock, from which Creighton came,
dominated his nature. His paradoxes might
astound academical circles, his free speech might
agitate the lesser clergy, but at heart he was
absolutely sound. Even a friendship with that
daemonic imp, Samuel Butler, left him un-
corroded. He believed in the Real Presence.
He was opposed to Home Rule. He read with
grave attention the novels ‘of Mrs. Humphry
Ward. The emancipation of a Victorian bishop
could never be as that of other men. The string
that tied him to the peg of tradition might be
quite a long one ; but it was always there.
Creighton enjoyed his little runs with the gusto
and vitality that were invariably his. The sharp
aquiline face, with the grizzled beard, the bald
forehead, and the gold spectacles, gleamed and
glistened, the long, slim form, so dapper in its
episcopal gaiters, preened itself delightedly, as
an epigram — a devastating epigram — shot off
and exploded, and the Fulham teacups tinkled
as they had never tinkled before. Then, a

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moment later, the guests gone, the firm mouth
closed in severe determination ; work was
resumed. The duties of the day were dispatched
swiftly ; the vast and stormy diocese of London
was controlled with extraordinary efficiency ;
while a punctual calmness reigned, for, however
pressed and pestered, the Bishop was never
known to fuss. Only once on a railway journey,
when he believed that some valuable papers had
gone astray, did his equanimity desert him.
“ Where’s my black bag ? ” was his repeated
inquiry. His mischievous children treasured up
this single lapse ; and, ever afterwards, “Where’s
my black bag ? ” was thrown across the table
at the good-humoured prelate when his family
was in a teasing mood.

When the fourth volume of the History of the
Papacy appeared there was a curious little
controversy, which illustrated Creighton’s atti-
tude to history and, indeed, to life. “ It seems
to me,” he wrote in the preface, “ neither
necessary to moralise at every turn in historical
writing, nor becoming to adopt an attitude of
lofty superiority over any one who ever played
a prominent part in European affairs, nor
charitable to lavish undiscriminating censure on

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any man.” The wrath of Lord Acton was
roused. He wrote a violent letter of protest.
The learning of the eminent Catholic was at
least equal to Creighton’s, but he made no
complaint upon matters of erudition ; it was his
moral sense that was outraged. Creighton, it
seemed to him, had passed over, with inexcusable
indifference, the persecution and intolerance of
the mediaeval Church. The popes of the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries, he wrote,
“ . . . instituted a system of persecution. . . .
It is the most conspicuous fact in the history of
the mediaeval Papacy. . . . But what amazes
and disables me is that you speak of the Papacy
not as exercising a just severity, but as not
exercising any severity. You ignore, you even
deny, at least implicitly, the existence of the
torture chamber and the stake. . . . Now the
Liberals think persecution a crime of a worse
order than adultery, and the acts done by
Ximenes considerably worse than the entertain-
ment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VI.
The responsibility exists whether the thing per-
mitted be good or bad. If the thing be criminal,
then the authority permitting it bears the
guilt. ... You say that people in authority are

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CREIGHTON

not to be snubbed or sneered at from our
pinnacle of conscious rectitude. I really don’t
know whether you exempt them because of their
rank, or of their success and power, or of their
date. . . . Historic responsibility has to make up
for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends
to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts abso-
lutely. Great men are almost always bad.”
These words, surely, are magnificent. One sees
with surprise and exhilaration the roles reversed
— the uncompromising fervour of Catholicism
calling down fire from Heaven upon its own
abominable popes and the worldly Protestantism
that excused them. Creighton’s reply was as
Anglican as might have been expected. He
hedged. One day, he wrote, John Bright had
said, “ If the people knew what sort of men
statesmen were, they would rise and hang the
whole lot of them.” Next day Gladstone had
said “ Statesmanship is the noblest way to serve
mankind.” “ I am sufficient of a Hegelian to be
able to combine both judgments ; but the results
of my combination cannot be expressed in the
terms of the logic of Aristotle. . . . Society is an
organism,” etc. It is clear enough that his real
difference with Lord Acton was not so much over

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the place of morals in history as over the nature
of the historical acts upon which moral judg-
ments are to be passed. The Bishop’s imagina-
tion was not deeply stirred by the atrocities of
the Inquisition ; what interested him, what
appealed to him, what he really understood, were
the difficulties and the expedients of a man of
affairs who found himself at the head of a great
administration. He knew too well, with ritualists
on one side and Kensitites on the other, the
trials and troubles from which a clerical ruler
had to extricate himself as best he could, not to
sympathise (in his heart of hearts) with the
clerical rulers of another age who had been
clever enough to devise regulations for the
elimination of heresy and schism, and strong
enough to put those regulations into force.

He himself, however, was never a persecutor ;
his great practical intelligence prevented that.
Firmly fixed in the English tradition of common
sense, compromise and comprehension, he held
on his way amid the shrieking of extremists with
imperturbable moderation. One of his very last
acts was to refuse to prosecute two recalcitrant
clergymen who had persisted in burning incense
in a forbidden manner. He knew that, in

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England at any rate, persecution did not work.
Elsewhere, perhaps, it might be different ; in
Russia, for instance. . . . There was an exciting
moment in Creighton’s life when he was sent to
Moscow to represent the Church of England at
the Coronation of the Emperor Nicholas ; and
his comments on that occasion were significant.
Clad in a gorgeous cope of red and gold, with
mitre and crozier, the English prelate attracted
every eye. He thoroughly relished the fact ; he
tasted, too, to the full, the splendour of the great
ceremonies and the extraordinary display of
autocratic power. That there might have been
some degree of spiritual squalor mixed with
those magnificent appearances never seemed to
occur to him. He was fascinated by the
apparatus of a mighty organisation, and, with
unerring instinct, made straight for the prime
mover of it, the Chief Procurator of the Holy
Synod, the sinister Pobiedonostzeff, with whom
he struck up a warm friendship. He was
presented to the Emperor and Empress, and
found them charming. “ I was treated with
great distinction, as I was called in first. The
Empress looked very nice, dressed in white silk.”
The aristocratic Acton would, no doubt, have

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viewed things in a different light. “ Absolute
power corrupts absolutely ” — so he had said ;
but Creighton had forgotten the remark. He
was no Daniel. He saw no Writing on the Wall.

The Bishop died in his prime, at the height of
his success and energy, and was buried in St.
Paul’s Cathedral. Not far from his tomb, which
a Victorian sculptor did his best to beautify,
stands the strange effigy of John Donne,
preaching, in his shroud, an incredible sermon
upon mortality. Lingering in that corner, one’s
mind flashes oddly to other scenes and other
persons. One passes down the mouldering
street of Ferrara, and reaches an obscure church.
In the half-light, from an inner door, an elderly
humble nun approaches, indicating with her
patois a marble slab in the pavement — a Latin
inscription — the grave of Lucrezia Borgia.
Mystery and oblivion were never united more
pathetically. But there is another flash, and
one is on a railway platform under the grey sky
of England. A tall figure hurries by, spectacled
and bearded, with swift clerical legs, and a
voice — a competent, commanding, yet slightly
agitated voice — says sharply : “ Where’s my

black bag ? ”